Last Updated on May 19, 2022
The music scene is where I’m happiest in life. As an amateur musician, I spend a lot of time improving my technique, practicing, practicing, and practicing. I also love listening to professional musicians. Linux is my other passion. Linux is endowed with bountiful globs of open source multimedia software. I love testing out new multimedia software early in its development, or introduce myself to popular software that’s mature and laden with tons of features. The choice is bamboozling.
I’ve covered the vast majority of free and open source music players for Linux, but there’s always more to look at. This week, I’ve been exploring LXMusic. It’s a minimalist music player for LXDE, a lightweight desktop environment. The project aims to be the default music player of LXDE, but it runs on any desktop environment.
LXMusic is written in the C programming language, and uses GTK+, a highly usable, feature rich toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. LXMusic is based on xmms2, using xmms2d, a daemon through which XMMS2 clients playback and manage music.
Installation
Time has been at a premium this week, so I haven’t tried to compile the source code for myself. Instead, there’s a convenient package available in my distro. If you have any problems compiling the source code, let us know.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
“The software isn’t under active development.”
Last release was lxmusic-0.4.7.tar.xz on 2016-02-21 which was almost 4 years ago.
As LXDE and its components has been superceded by LXQt and Qt based applications, it could be inferred that development of LXMusic is not just inactive but has been abandoned.
That’s not necessarily the case. I’ve seen tons of open source projects where the original developer(s) has long since departed, but someone else comes along and takes on the mantle. That’s the beauty of open source software.
The code quality looks fairly polished and understandable. It appears like a good project for someone to takeover and continue development. I’d contribute a few commits if there’s a maintainer out there.