Tauon-Music-Box

Tauon Music Box – Excellent desktop music player

Last Updated on September 3, 2020

Settings: View / Transcode / Accounts / Stats

View

Tauon-Settings-View

You can change the UI scaling for HiDPI displays although the default 1x was fine for my setup.

Desktop notifications of track changes are displayed by default. They can be turned off. You can also turn off the top-panel visualization (definitely recommended).

You may notice there’s no window title on any of my screenshots. That’s because the software draws its own window decorations. But you can turn them off. And you might choose to do so as, when enabled, it’s a bit fiddly to resize the window.

By default the turbo theme is used. If that doesn’t float your bloat, there are other themes available. These themes are titled Vape, Wasp, Mindaro, Astro, Cucumber Splash, Lavender Light,  Lime, Rose, and Sky. All of the themes retain the dark background with the exception of Lavender Light. The themes are stored in plain text files. You can edit the theme files to create your own customized theme.

Transcode

Tauon-Settings-Transcode

Transcoding is a digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another. The software offers batch transcoding of folders using an external tool, the popular cli ffmpeg. This makes it easy to copy your music to a portable music player.

There’s four output codecs available, and you can define the bitrate offering another trade-off between file size and quality. Simple and very effective to use.

Accounts

Tauon-Settings-Accounts

Here you enter your account settings for Last.fm. This offers scrobbling with track love support. You can also see your friends’ favorite tracks too.

ListenBrainz is an open source project and allows users to preserve their existing Last.fm data.

Stats

This section shows the number of tracks in the current playlist, the number of albums in that playlist, and the playlist duration.

There’s also stats on the tracks in your music database, the total number of albums, and the total playtime.

Next page: Page 7 – Other Features

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

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9 Comments
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Cameron Clyne
Cameron Clyne
5 years ago

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.

Nicholas Clay
Nicholas Clay
5 years ago

This is a real gem of a music player. Definitely worth downloading.

Neil D
Neil D
5 years ago

Excellent is often over-used by web sites. But here’s an occasion where excellent isn’t just another superlative.

Phillip
Phillip
4 years ago

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

Tony
Tony
2 years ago

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.

Ben
Ben
1 year ago

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.

OBx
OBx
1 year ago
Reply to  Ben

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.

Kyle R
Kyle R
1 year ago

I think Tauon is overrated to be honest. While the range of features is impressive, the interface is turgid for a music player.