Last Updated on September 3, 2020
Over the past few months I’ve covered numerous open source graphical music players. They’ve been a mixed bag. Some are genuinely excellent, others falling short of my (fairly) modest requirements. The music players I’ve mostly reviewed include ncmpy, ncmpc, and Cantata. I’ve also reviewed Nulloy, Museeks, Pragha Music Player, Yarock, qoob, aux.app, MellowPlayer, Kaku, Strawberry, Headset, Qmmp, and the truly sublime musikcube. The vast majority of the music players are GUI software.
Continuing my series, here’s a further graphical music player. Bearing the moniker Tauon Music Box (Tauon), it’s based around disposable playlists and the assumption that folders are albums. They are also intended to function as a kind of workspace or to keep different music collections separate.
The project instructs users to ensure they have an organized and structured music library, ideally with each album in its own folder. Sound advice.
The software is written in the Python programming language. It uses Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA), not PulseAudio.
Installation
The project doesn’t provide any official packages for popular Linux distributions, but there’s a package available in the Arch User Repository. There’s an official Flatpak package offering a sandbox environment to use the software.
As the full source code is available, you can also clone the project’s repository with the following command.
$ git clone https://github.com/Taiko2k/TauonMusicBox.git
The developer provides an installer for Windows if you’re still living in a proprietary world.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Views
Page 4 – Settings: Function / Audio
Page 5 – Settings: EQ / Playlist
Page 6 – Settings: View / Transcode / Accounts / Stats
Page 7 – Other Features
Page 8 – Memory Comparison
Page 9 – Summary
I agree with the review in the main. I’m really loving Tauon Music Box, it’s probably my favorite music player. Does everything I want and much more. This sounds like a sales pitch. But of course it’s totally free and open source software.
This is a real gem of a music player. Definitely worth downloading.
Excellent is often over-used by web sites. But here’s an occasion where excellent isn’t just another superlative.
Damm is this good! I’m a new ARCH user, been searching for just the “right” player for my collection, WOW! and I’ve used EVERYTHING open-source… I “bow” to the developer… Well Done. Phillip
I have just discovered Tauon via this website. I have used many music players for Linux, most of them are unsuitable, having no gapless playback, or an over-fussy GUI.
I was using qmmp, with the non-skinned (simple) interface, which operates like a file browswer, and facilitates easy drag-and-drop playlist compilation.
Tauon offers both a music library by scanning your Home Music folder, and also drag-and-drop for playlists. Either way, album art can be displayed if you choose, and the image size can be changed, as can the font size within the entire GUI.
It also offers a choice of audio output options, i.e. ALSA, Pulseaudio or JACK.
A very welcome bonus is the stylish interface, often lacking in Linux software. Several colour schemes can be chosen.
As I write, I have been using Tauon only for a few days, and I think I’m going to be using it a lot more.
Interested that it’s so highly praised. I added it, and couldn’t even find a way to point it to read my music from /mnt/T3/Music/Musicbrainz (my sorted folder).
It looks like too much flash – and insanely ‘Importing… 45567’ right now when I have only 1670 files currently in my ‘sorted’ music directory.
Like a lot of feature-laden software, it’s worth reading the manual.
Tauon is a playlist oriented music player. To get started, try importing all your music into a single playlist.
Never seen Tauon misread the number of music files like yours. If you’re still getting an issue, raise it upstream.
I think Tauon is overrated to be honest. While the range of features is impressive, the interface is turgid for a music player.
I can understand why you don’t like the interface.