gmusicbrowser Music Player Sees First Release In More Than 5 Years
After almost 5 and a half years of no new releases, gmusicbrowser was finally updated. The latest gmusicbrowser 1.1.16 brings support for Opus files, adds musixmatch.com as a music source to the Lyrics plugin, and it fixes the replaygain, equalizer and gapless playback with mpv 0.28.0 and newer, among many other small changes.
gmusicbrowser is an audio player for large music collections, that can play mp3, ogg, flac (and opus/mpc/ape/m4a with gstreamer, mplayer or mpv) and more. The application was quite popular a while back, thanks to its highly customizable user interface with multiple layouts, and features like the ability to filter music with unlimited nesting and conditions, or its mass music tagging and renaming abilities.
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| gmusicbrowser using its built-in Audacious-like layout |
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| gmusicbrowser Shimmer Desktop layout |
Other features include:
- options to restrict playing music to the current artist/album and even related songs
- customizable Weighted Random mode
- offers options for multiple audio backends: GStreamer 1.x, mpg123/ogg123/etc, mplayer and mpv
- plugins for album and artist info, last.fm, lyrics, MPRIS v2, notifications, rip CDs, picture finder, Karaoke, Gnome multimedia keys, and even desktop widgets.
- music equalizer, ReplayGain, etc.
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Changes in gmusicbrowser 1.1.16 include:
- add support for .opus files
- add option to simplify tree in folder pane
- add option to ignore articles when sorting
- add has_picture and has_lyrics optional fields
- add artist_has_picture and album_has_picture virtual fields
- PictureBrowser: add embedded picture mode (+ all files mode)
- PictureBrowser: add "Reset view position when file changes" option
- add option to some fields to show a "find songs with same ..." menu item
- FilterPanes: add option to ignore 'none' row for histogram
- add support for mp2 extension
- picture finder plugin: update picture sources
- audioscrobbler plugin: add a line showing number of plays waiting and button to send them now
- lyrics plugin: add musixmatch.com source
- artistinfo plugin: update parsing of artist biography
- mpv: fix replaygain, equalizer & gapless playback with versions >= 0.28.0
- mplayer: fix mplayer2/mpv-style options not working with mplayer1
- fix not working with perl >=5.24
- fix crash when using search-as-you-type in SongList
The complete release notes can be found by visiting this link.
This gmusicbrowser release continues to use Gtk2, but work to port it to Gtk3 is in progress, with one of the developers saying that "the port is mostly finished, including plugins" but that "there are still some issues". When ported to Gtk3, we should see the application back in Debian (it's not available in versions newer than Buster), Ubuntu (it's not in the Ubuntu 20.04 or 20.10 repositories) and other Linux distributions where it's no longer available.
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Download gmusicbrowser
Right now as binary there's only a DEB package that you can install on Debian and Ubuntu-based Linux distributions (including Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Zorin OS, etc.).
gmusicbrowser was added recently on Flathub, so it's easy to install across various Linux distributions. At the time I'm writing this article, the Flathub package is using the latest Git instead of the latest 1.1.16 stable release.
The application continues to be in the official repositories on several Linux distributions, despite its long hiatus, but it has not yet been updated to the latest version (e.g. in Debian, Arch Linux, etc.). For Arch Linux there are third-party AUR packages for both gmusicbrowser stable and git.
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