fooyin – customisable music player

Please read our review of v0.3.7.

Like many types of software, the selection of a favorite music player is, to some extent, dependent on personal preferences. But we hope our reviews of music players help narrow the field.

All music libraries are different, and the right open source music player can make a world of difference – especially if you’ve a large collection.

I’ve reviewed the vast majority of music players for Linux. My last few reviews have been dominated by Electron-based players. But this review is different.

Fooyin is billed as a customisable music player. The word customizable is different to what it normally means. Here, we can choose which widgets to display so that the entire user interface can be customized to our heart’s content.

Fooyin is based on Qt 6.6.1, written in C++ and published under an open source license.

Installation

We normally test software with Ubuntu 23.10, but because of time issues, and the lack of an easy installation process, we reverted to Manjaro for this review.

There’s a package in the Arch User Repository which can be installed with an AUR helper such as yay or paru, or using pamac, Manjaro’s GUI installation tool. We’ll use yay:

yay -S fooyin

The compilation appears to proceed with no issues. But if we try to start Fooyin from our Applications menu, no happens. In this situation, run the program from a terminal to see what’s going on.

Let’s see if there are any other errors with shared libraries. The ldd program comes in handy here. Fooyin puts a shell script in /usr/bin/ but we need to point ldd at where the executable actually is stored.

$ ldd /opt/fooyin/fooyin

The three shared libraries are located at /opt/fooyin/lib.

We can fix the issue by creating a symbolic link to each library. Also termed a soft link, a symbolic link is just a special kind of file that points to another file.

$ sudo ln -sf libfooyin_gui.so libfooyin_gui.so.0.0.0
$ sudo ln -sf libfooyin_core.so libfooyin_core.so.0.0.0
$ sudo ln -sf libfooyin_utils.so libfooyin_utils.so.0.0.0

Our directory listing now looks like this:

If we rerun the ldd command, the shared libraries are now found. Woohoo!

We can now start Fooyin from the Applications menu or from the command-line.

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary