Pogo – minimalist music player

Last Updated on August 11, 2021

My favorite pastime is to see an eclectic range of bands, solo artists, and orchestras live. It’s such a life-changing and exhilarating experience to be present. It’s one thing to be sitting at home listening to a CD or watching music videos on TV or on YouTube, but being with an audience, packed out in a stadium or music hall, takes it to another level. But it’s an expensive pastime, and still on hold given the current coronavirus pandemic. I’m therefore listening to music from my CD collection which I’ve encoded to FLAC, a lossless audio format, and stored locally.

Linux offers a huge array of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. I’ve reviewed the vast majority for LinuxLinks, but I’m endeavoring to explore every free music player in case there’s an undiscovered gem.

Pogo is billed as a fast and minimalist audio player for Linux. It’s written in Python and uses GTK+ and GStreamer, the latter is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows.

Pogo was forked from Decibel Audio Player, a defunct music player that saw its last release in September 2011.

Installation

The easiest way to install Pogo is to use a package contained in your distro’s repositories. For example, there’s a package in the Arch User Repository for folk who use Arch or Arch-based distros.

We tested Pogo using the latest version of Ubuntu. To install Pogo on Ubuntu, type the following commands in a shell.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pogo-dev/stable
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install pogo

Pogo is open source software, so you can compile the source code if there’s no package available in your distribution.

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary