Linux has so many music players. But that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be one more.
If you use a general purpose media player to access your music collection, you’re missing out on a wealth of features that can improve your listening experience. That’s why we recommend a dedicated music player. Linux offers a huge range to choose from which is why we put together this roundup to help save you time. But there are always other projects springing up.
Nora is billed as an elegant music player. It’s built using Electron and React. This is free and open source software.
Installation
We tested Nora using Ubuntu 23.10. There’s a binary deb package available as well as an AppImage.
For the deb package, we downloaded it with wget.
$ wget https://github.com/Sandakan/Nora/releases/download/v2.5.0-stable/Nora-Setup-2.5.0-stable-linux-amd64.deb
The deb package is installed with the command:
$ sudo dpkg -i Nora-Setup-2.5.0-stable-linux-amd64.deb
If you’re not using Debian/Ubuntu, you can use the AppImage. Download it:
$ wget https://github.com/Sandakan/Nora/releases/download/v2.5.0-stable/Nora-Setup-2.5.0-stable-linux-x86_64.AppImage
Make it executable:
$ chmod u+x Nora-Setup-2.5.0-stable-linux-x86_64.AppImage
On our test system, Nora didn’t run with either approach, aborting with the error:
A JavaScript error occurred in the main process Uncaught Exception: Error: Could not load the "sharp" module using the linux-x64 runtime
This error is fixed by installing libvips, an image processing library.
$ sudo apt install libvips
Nora is cross-platform software. Besides support for Linux, it also runs under Windows.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Settings
Page 4 – Summary
Electron = bloat
There are a lot of design decisions which have to be made by a developer when starting a project. It’s so important to start from a good foundation.
So often, poor decisions at the start really hamper a project. Nora’s developer seems stymied adding gapless playback because of a poor choice of framework.
I don’t recall seeing Electron-based music players offering gapless playback. At least I’ve never seen one, but maybe there is?
A shame that Electron was chosen. It’s such an awful framework.
I will continue to use a WINAMP type clone, under linux. I rather have simple and nice looks. For video, VLC is the one. Most linux are too bloated with options. That maybe okay for a new user, but a hard user a stripper option need to be offered. As in the newer DEBIAN install, One can do a base desktop install with no extra fluff software. A APT install will get you all needed tools and toys. Bloat can be a good learning thing for a new user, to see and use other options. But a hard core user doesn’t need the fluff.
VLC is bloated for video (and terrible for audio as it doesn’t even have gapless playback).
mpv is definitely superior for video.