Qt Cloud Music Player MellowPlayer Updated With Remote Control Support, Pandora Radio Plugin
MellowPlayer was updated recently with support for remote controlling the application from any another device, Pandora support, and more.
MellowPlayer is a free and open source Qt-based desktop application for using and integrating cloud music services (and more) with your desktop, available for Linux and Windows.
It supports many services, like Apple Music, Deezer, Mixcloud, Soundcloud, Spotify, TuneIn, 8tracks, Google Play Music, YouTube and YouTube Music, Tidal, Jamendo, Radionomy, Plex, Netflix, Yandex Music, and more; note that its website doesn't list all supported services, most probably because not all are supported on Windows, and on Linux when using the AppImage.
Each online music streaming service is integrated as a plugin, which makes it easy to add support for more services in the future.
The desktop integrations consist of a system tray icon, customizable hotkeys / multimedia keys support, can be controlled using MPRIS v2 (e.g. sound menu in various desktop environments), and notifications.
This is the latest MellowPlayer (with its YouTube plugin) integrated with the Linux Mint Cinnamon sound applet:
Other MellowPlayer features:
MellowPlayer 3.6.0 (quickly followed by 3.6.1 and 3.6.2 to fix a couple of bugs) comes with remote control support, so you can control the playback from any device. For this you need to install MellowPlayer.Connect (and enable remote control in the Mellow Player settings), a web server application that displays a simple web interface to remote control MellowPlayer.
It's worth noting that KDE Connect (and GSConnect) users can control Mellow Player by enabling the MPRIS plugin - with this plugin enabled, open the KDE Connect application on your Android device, click on Multimedia Control and you'll find playback controls for MellowPlayer there, along with the currently playing song title and album art. This works with any MPRIS v2-compatible media player, and not just MellowPlayer.
The new version of MellowPlayer has also added automatic detection of broken plugins (music services). When the application detects that a plugin is broken, it notifies the user and let them know if the issue is already known or not.
MellowPlayer 1.6 also adds support for Pandora, also known as Pandora Radio. This is a freemium music streaming and automated music recommendation internet radio service, available only in the U.S.
More changes in MellowPlayer 1.6 (and 1.6.1 + 1.6.2):
Related -> Olivia: Cloud-Based Music Player With YouTube Support And Over 25,000 Online Radio Stations
MellowPlayer is available for Microsoft Windows and Linux. On Linux you can find native binaries for Debian, Ubuntu and openSUSE, as well as a Flatpak package and generic AppImage.
It's very important to note that some MellowPlayer plugins (web music services) require flash, non-free HTML codecs and/or Widevine. This list, while not updated in a while (so it doesn't contain some more recent plugins like Apple Music or Pandora), shows what some plugins require. The list also shows what plugins are missing from some packages (e.g. on Windows or in the Linux AppImage). This page shows how to install Widevine (drm) in case you need it for some plugin (in short you need to copy libwidevinecdm.so to /usr/lib/chromium).
I'd also have to add that the MellowPlayer AppImage fails to run on my Ubuntu 20.04 desktop.
The MellowPlayer documentation also explains how to install MellowPlayer on Fedora, ArchLinux (AUR) and KaOS.
MellowPlayer is a free and open source Qt-based desktop application for using and integrating cloud music services (and more) with your desktop, available for Linux and Windows.
It supports many services, like Apple Music, Deezer, Mixcloud, Soundcloud, Spotify, TuneIn, 8tracks, Google Play Music, YouTube and YouTube Music, Tidal, Jamendo, Radionomy, Plex, Netflix, Yandex Music, and more; note that its website doesn't list all supported services, most probably because not all are supported on Windows, and on Linux when using the AppImage.
Each online music streaming service is integrated as a plugin, which makes it easy to add support for more services in the future.
The desktop integrations consist of a system tray icon, customizable hotkeys / multimedia keys support, can be controlled using MPRIS v2 (e.g. sound menu in various desktop environments), and notifications.
This is the latest MellowPlayer (with its YouTube plugin) integrated with the Linux Mint Cinnamon sound applet:
Other MellowPlayer features:
- Customizable tray icon and application theme (comes with 7 built-in themes, and allows making your own)
- Automatic or manual HiDPI scaling
- Song history: it can keep track of the songs you play using each service, with a configurable time frame. Listening history is not enabled by default
- Support for network proxy and user scripts
- Service-specific options for a couple of services:
- skip credits option for Netflix
- automatically skip and mute ads, and close bottom banner ads for YouTube and YouTube music
MellowPlayer 3.6.0 (quickly followed by 3.6.1 and 3.6.2 to fix a couple of bugs) comes with remote control support, so you can control the playback from any device. For this you need to install MellowPlayer.Connect (and enable remote control in the Mellow Player settings), a web server application that displays a simple web interface to remote control MellowPlayer.
It's worth noting that KDE Connect (and GSConnect) users can control Mellow Player by enabling the MPRIS plugin - with this plugin enabled, open the KDE Connect application on your Android device, click on Multimedia Control and you'll find playback controls for MellowPlayer there, along with the currently playing song title and album art. This works with any MPRIS v2-compatible media player, and not just MellowPlayer.
The new version of MellowPlayer has also added automatic detection of broken plugins (music services). When the application detects that a plugin is broken, it notifies the user and let them know if the issue is already known or not.
MellowPlayer 1.6 also adds support for Pandora, also known as Pandora Radio. This is a freemium music streaming and automated music recommendation internet radio service, available only in the U.S.
More changes in MellowPlayer 1.6 (and 1.6.1 + 1.6.2):
- Add a filter bar at the top of the main MellowPlayer view (which lists available services) and the ability to filter by favorite services. This makes it easy to find the cloud music service you're looking for, now that MellowPlayer has grown a lot, and supports many services
- Change to logging rules & related command line arguments. All.log should always contain all debug messages, while the console logs should be limited to info messages by default. Also replace
--log-level/-loption by--verbose/-V&--very-verbose/-W. The verbose option enables debug messages in console while the very-verbose option additionally enables trace messages - Add `Accept-Language` header support which should make MellowPlayer respect the system language for the websites (web music services) loaded through it
- Add the ability to show the player bar (in case it was hidden) from the contextual menu
- Fixed Mixcloud plugin
- Fixed Spotify plugin broken when trying to control it from the KDE Plasma add-on
- Other fixes
Related -> Olivia: Cloud-Based Music Player With YouTube Support And Over 25,000 Online Radio Stations
Download MellowPlayer
MellowPlayer is available for Microsoft Windows and Linux. On Linux you can find native binaries for Debian, Ubuntu and openSUSE, as well as a Flatpak package and generic AppImage.
It's very important to note that some MellowPlayer plugins (web music services) require flash, non-free HTML codecs and/or Widevine. This list, while not updated in a while (so it doesn't contain some more recent plugins like Apple Music or Pandora), shows what some plugins require. The list also shows what plugins are missing from some packages (e.g. on Windows or in the Linux AppImage). This page shows how to install Widevine (drm) in case you need it for some plugin (in short you need to copy libwidevinecdm.so to /usr/lib/chromium).
I'd also have to add that the MellowPlayer AppImage fails to run on my Ubuntu 20.04 desktop.
The MellowPlayer documentation also explains how to install MellowPlayer on Fedora, ArchLinux (AUR) and KaOS.
