In Operation
Here’s an image of Juk in action. We’ve loaded our small collection of Creative-Commons licensed music.
Juk organizes your files in multiple playlists in a simple and user friendly yet powerful way. The software also lets us edit the “tags” of our audio files, and manage our collection and playlists.
We always consider a music player must have gapless playback. Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. It’s essential if you listen to classical, electronic music, concept albums, and progressive rock. There’s a few Linux music players that don’t offer gapless playback.
Sadly JuK falls into the minority camp bereft of gapless playback. That’s a showstopper in our book.
Features include:
- Collection list and multiple user defined playlists.
- Scan directories to automatically import playlists and music files on start up.
- Dynamic Search Playlists that are automatically updated as fields in the collection change.
- Tree View mode where playlists are automatically generated for sets of albums, artists and genres.
- Search functionality. Quickly search for a song in the collection list or a playlist.
- Playlist history to indicate which files have been played and when.
- Inline search for filtering the list of visible items.
- Full featured tag editor allows you to edit the tags for MP3 and OGG files. Edit single files or multiple files, with the ability to select a mix of MP3 and OGG files to edit.
- Guess tag information from the file name.
- File renamer that can rename files based on the tag content.
- ID3v1, ID3v2 and Ogg Vorbis tag reading and editing support (via TagLib).
- Random playback including random album playback.
- Support for cover art.
Summary
There are some things that JuK does well. It’s a competent, stable, and mature music player. It supports the essential MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC audio formats, and its tag editor is well implemented.
However, on balance, JuK is a long way from warranting our recommendation. There are far better music players available. Its feature set is pretty limited and has, in fact, gone backwards in some respects. And its lack of gapless playback is hugely disappointing.
Website: juk.kde.org
Support: Wiki
Developer: Scott Wheeler, Michael Pyne and contributors
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
JuK is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary