Many of our audio reviews have explored music players that are in an early stage of development. We’re always conscious that it can be unfair to review software too early in its lifecycle. It’s not surprising that they can miss essential functionality or lack stability and polish. Sometimes it’s best to wait until software has matured somewhat before putting it under the microscope.
Nevertheless, it’s often interesting to look at newcomers to the scene. After all, mighty oaks grow from little acorns, and all projects have to start somewhere.
MusicPod is an example of a project that’s in a very early stage of development. It’s a music, radio and podcast player wrapped up in a graphical user interface.
The project is written in the Dart programming language.
MusicPod uses Metadata God, an audio file metadata reading and writing library for Flutter, as well as podcast_search, a simple library providing programmatic access to the iTunes search API for podcasts.
Installation
There’s a snap available which we installed in the usual way:
$ sudo snap install musicpod
The full source code is available, but we haven’t tried to compile the software. There’s no package in the Arch User Repository.
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
We have radio-browser internet resource, coupled with pyradio, Tuner, Shortwave – we don’t need this added to our music players.
We have feeds and excellent working podcast players for those that use them (Kasts is my choice, though I generally just listen via the feed reader).
So really, we have no need for this Ubuntu focussed Snapd fluff (especially the many of us who don’t use any Snaps and don’t bother enabling it).
Linux has some good music, internet radio and podcast players but they are far from perfect. While you may be happy with the apps at present, you don’t speak for me. So please don’t say “we don’t need”… What you mean to say is “you don’t need”.
I can think of other software categories where there is a far wider choice. And choice is important. Sure there are other fields where Linux apps is pretty ropey to say the least. But they are likely really hard for a new developer to tackle.
The thing is, people keep coming up with multiple apps which offer nothing new – in which case I would prefer separate and very good applications.
Guayadeque, with smart playlists and ‘smart play’ auto ‘DJ’ style with filters was brilliant – and Strawberry does very good work.
Choice is important when most of the apps suck – you’re right. Simply put, I can tolerate Strawberry, but Guayadeque is still far and away the best – but it’s development is down to basic maintenance, and it’s just not working as well as it should now.
I’m not a coder so I can’t donate code. Instead I donate financially to open source projects I love.
At least Guayadeque still compiles and works reasonably well. And I’m sure Juan Rios could use help going forwards.
You must be fun at parties.