We’ve reviewed a smorgasbord of open source music players. But Linux is endowed with a huge selection, and there’s still a few we’ve yet to review.
FLB Music is billed as a ‘beautiful cross platform music player’. It’s written in TypeScript and uses Vue.js, a model–view–viewmodel front end JavaScript framework for building user interfaces and single-page applications.
Installation
The project doesn’t provide any distro-specific packages. However, the developer provides an AppImage and a snap, so installation is trivial whatever distro you’re using.
On our Ubuntu 21.04 systems, we installed the snap with the command:
$ sudo snap install flbmusic
For the AppImage, download it from the author’s website (see Summary section for the link) and make the file executable with the command:
$ chmod u+x FLB-Music-1.1.7-AppImage
AppImage is a universal software format for distributing portable software on Linux without needing superuser permissions to install the application. AppImage doesn’t really install software. It’s a compressed image with all the dependencies and libraries needed to run the desired software.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Memory Usage
Page 4 – Summary
It’s refreshing to see coverage of open source software that’s garbage. Too often open source software is portrayed as the bees knees when the majority is turgid. Someone will remind me that great oaks from little acorns grow. That’s possible too.
What’s a good collective noun to describe turkey open source software?
Great oaks from little acorns grow
I honestly couldn’t agree more, i think it is a beautiful player it really does kinda suck functionality wise, I have decent gaming pc and it suffers from severe slowdowns when this app runs and the app itself crashes sometimes. It is a good concept, because I do love the way it looks visually but It needs a lot of work under the hood to be my main player. I scrobble all my music and the lack of that option eliminates this player for me.
I really want to defend FLB Music. But in this instance it would be defending the indefensible.
That said the developer puts in a lot of work to try to put together his player. That should be applauded. With time the many bugs may be ironed out, essential functionality added, and it’ll be a gem of a player.
I’m not concerned about gapless playback and never use scrobbling. Within my circle of friends, they fall into the ‘nice to have’ camp, but I understand why some people will not move away from their current music player if the new contender doesn’t have them. I’m just getting into classical music.
That’s a hefty memory footprint, at least it’s less than most web browsers.