Last Updated on September 3, 2020
In operation
When you start up the software for the first time, you’re presented with a blank window, and instructed to drag and drop files to import. The software creates an empty playlist called “Default”. But it’s crying out for a wizard to help newcomers along the way.
Don’t judge software by first impressions. To get started you just need to drag and drop music folders from a file manager to the playlist. They’ll populate that Default playlist.
In the next image, I’ve created some playlists. They are really easy to create, rename, and populate. You can also import all music from your home music folder. If your music collection is updated, you’ll need to manually update, as the software doesn’t offer background monitoring.
A truncated list of the playlists appear at the top pushing the MENU over towards the centre of the top bar. Clicking the top left hand button reveals the playlists in a vertical list. Also at the top is a spectrum visualizer. Right click on the spectrum visualizer gives you the option to change it to show a level meter, a spectrogram, or turn it off. The latter is my preferred option.
The main part of the window is occupied by the playlist, cover art, title of the track and album. At the bottom are standard playback button, and a progress bar. There’s also a repeat button, shuffle playback, playback menu, volume control, and time elapsed of the current track. The playback menu offers random track, radio random, love the track, and global search. Radio random plays a random track with a random starting time. It’s intended to help you discover songs you’ve long forgotten about. There’s advanced playback modes too: album repeat mode, album shuffle mode, and shuffle within a single album.
In my opinion, the interface lacks polish, the buttons are rather too utilitarian for my liking, and the repeat and shuffle buttons are grisly. But these are very small grievances really.
The music players supports a good range of music formats including my favorite lossless format FLAC, as well as other lossless/lossy formats including APE, TTA, WV, MP3, M4A (aac, alac), OGG, and OPUS.
I’ve mentioned the cover art functionality. All good music players offer this. But Tauon goes that bit further. If you don’t have cover art for an album, right click where the cover art normally appears, and select “Search Google for Image”. A new tab opens in your web browser, displaying album covers. You can then drag a suitable image into the software. It works surprisingly well although image support is restricted to PNG and JPEG formats.
There’s search functionality available even though it’s not immediately apparent. Just type some text into the window, and you’ll be presented with search results.
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.