omg! ubuntu
A slick way to browse and stream your own private music collection
Looking for a Modern GTK MPD Client for Linux? Try Ymuse
by By Joey SneddonYmuse is a modern, open source Music Player Daemon (MPD) client written in GTK and Go.
As an MPD frontend the app provides you with clean, straightforward window through which to browse, manage, and stream music. Both responsive and lightweight Ymuse can apparently handle a 12,000+ track playlist with greater ease than Sonata, another popular GTK MPD client.
Because Ymuse is a frontend to MPD and not a music player itself you do need to have MPD set up and configured correctly in order to use this app — or to put another way: this isn’t a ‘user friendly MPD set-up wizard’.
If you are run MPD on your local machine (with default port and no password) then Ymuse will connect automatically as soon as you launch it. If your setup is a little more excotice you can can edit the network, host, port and password in the Ymuse > Preferences > General tab directly — nice!
MPD fans on the hunt for a modern Ubuntu MPD client which is actively maintained and modern looking should give Ymus a spin.
To learn more about this client’s features you can watch the video at the start of this post (which you won’t see if you’re reading from an RSS reader or scraper site, sorry) or by rolling your peepers over this condensed summary of its key points:
- Connect to local or remote MPD server
- MPD library browse and search functions
- See, sort, and shuffle play queue
- Filter play queue
- Track scrubbing
- Save play queue as a new or existing playlist
- Disable/enable queue columns
- Player title settings
- Toggles for shuffle, repeat, consume
- File rescanning
At the time of writing there’s no support for album or track artwork in the track browser (a la some of the fancy macOS MPD clients) but you can see cover art for the actively playing song (assuming it has artwork, of course).
Want to try it out?
Ymuse is free, open source software available for all major Linux distributions. You can download the latest versions from the project website in a choice of .deb, .rpm, and a snap package is also available.
To learn what else is on on the to-do list for this app, file bugs, or dive in to help development you can head over to the Ymuse on Github.
In short, YMuse is a solid alternative to the likes of Cantata, Sonata, and the ncmpdpp terminal app (among many other fine MPD clients and players) and one you’d be remiss to not try.
Kudos to Dmitry for letting me know about his app. If you’re working on an app, tool, extension, or utility don’t hesitate to get in touch via the Got News? link in the header.