Last Updated on September 3, 2020
I’ve written scores of reviews of open source graphical music players. They’ve been a fairly mixed bag. Some music players are genuinely excellent, others fall way short of my (fairly) modest requirements. There’s still a few interesting music players I’ve yet to cover. I’ll try to rectify this in the next few months, although most of my time is currently spent tinkering with the Raspberry Pi 4 (RPI4), which includes penning my weekly blog looking at whether the RPI4 is a capable desktop machine.
John Denmore of Arizona asked me to look at Melody, software billed as “a music player for listening to local music files, online radios, and Audio CD’s”.
What intrigued me is that Melody is designed for elementary OS, a distribution based on Ubuntu that focuses mainly on non-technical users. That pretty much describes me. I’ve been meaning to try elementary OS for a while. Before doing so, I’m going to explore some apps designed for it.
Installation
As the software is designed for elementary OS, it’s available to install in their AppCenter.
Although the software is designed for elementary OS, it was easy to install on my Arch workstation. The latest version is available in the Arch User Repository.
I suspect compiling the software on other distributions may be non-trivial. And with time at a premium this month, I’ll leave it to others to convey whether compiling the software on their favorite distribution is plain sailing or not.
If your distro doesn’t carry a package for Melody, and you don’t fancy compiling the software for yourself, there’s a Flatpak available. Besides offering an easy installation, it provides a sandbox environment in which you can run Melody in isolation from the rest of your system. There’s no snap or AppImage available from any official source.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Internet Radio
Page 4 – Memory Usage
Page 5 – Summary
Why do you keep plugging your Raspberry Pi blog?
We’re loving the Raspberry Pi blog from Luke. And from web traffic, it’s a very popular blog, generating lots of interest from both Linux and non-Linux users alike.
Does it embed picture of cover inside the file when possible – as Sayonara does ?
This is my first requirement ( I love my music to keep its face whatever device I play it on ). Never understood why such a feature is so rare in Linux realm. Gapless playback my second requirement, though.
Embedding pictures is unimportant for most users. Isn’t embedding pictures for mp3/id3v2 only? Any self-respecting music enthusiast listens to lossless formats like FLAC.
It is not possible to rip audio CDs to mp3 with Melody, isńt it?