fooyin v0.11.x is a substantial update for the customisable music player, with internet radio browsing standing out as one of the most welcome additions. The main changes arrived in v0.11.0, while v0.11.1 follows up as the current point release with a handful of interface improvements and fixes. Together, they make fooyin more useful beyond local music libraries, particularly for anyone who wants a single application for playing stored music and online audio streams.
Internet radio
A built-in Radio layout provides quick access to internet radio stations, with the functionality delivered through a new plugin. It’s a practical addition that broadens fooyin from a library-focused player into a more versatile music and radio application. This is the feature I’ve been most keen to see, and it’s definitely been worth the wait.
Part of fooyin’s appeal is its excellent directory browser and the depth of its customisation options, which let you configure the interface almost exactly how you want it. Here’s one of my customised layouts, which brings together both the directory browser and the new internet radio browser in a single view.
I’ve been testing the internet radio functionality for a couple of weeks, as I regularly pull the latest commits from the project’s GitHub repository.
The internet radio browser is beautifully implemented. Sensibly, fooyin doesn’t maintain its own radio catalogue. Instead, the new Radio Browser plugin taps into the public Radio Browser API, a community-maintained database of internet radio stations.
The functionality turns fooyin into a proper internet radio client. Users can discover stations, filter them, save favourites, save searches, and play remote radio streams without leaving the player. The plugin also fits fooyin’s layout system, so the radio browser can be embedded alongside other components such as the directory browser, playlist views, artwork, and playback controls rather than being confined to a separate fixed interface.
Is fooyin better than the best standalone internet radio app for Linux? It’s very close. The only major omission is stream recording, ideally with the option to save individual tracks from a radio stream, much like Shortwave already offers.
Visualisations
The visual side of fooyin has been expanded with a new spectrum visualiser, also implemented as a plugin.
The VU Meter has also been improved with peak falloff support, better synchronisation with playback, and more configuration options.
Other addtions:
- Remote stream playback.
- Playback has received useful refinements too. Gapless playback handling has been improved, and there’s now a separate time-based played threshold. The new Sleep Inhibitor plugin can stop the system from sleeping while music is playing, which is a welcome desktop convenience.
- More control over the interface. Layout management has been reworked with widget margin editing, individual splitter spacing, layout importing, and better behaviour for layout menus and Tab Stack widgets.
- Playlist handling is also much stronger. There’s now an integrated playlist search bar with result navigation, support for restoring deleted playlists, randomise and reverse sort actions, and per-playlist view layouts. Performance with large playlists has also been improved.
- Library handling sees optimisations, better encoding detection, configurable fallback encoding, and support for monitoring individual library files.
- Lyrics support has improved with line and word progress fill options, concurrent source searching, transparent backgrounds, and fixes for local lyric search stalls.
- The release also brings expanded themes, Quick Setup improvements, configurable player control buttons, better item view behaviour, plugin reorganisation, scripting additions, translation updates, and a long list of bug fixes.
Summary
In my opinion, fooyin is the best open source application for anyone who wants a powerful music player and internet radio player in a single program. Is it perfect? Of course not.
The developer plans to add audio conversion next, along with spectrogram support, followed by CD support and metadata lookup.
The issue tracker is full of requests for additional features, but many of them would make little difference to most music lovers. What would really elevate the program, though, is stronger documentation. I still find layout customisation a bit of a challenge, and more detailed guidance would make a big difference. A community section where users could share their own layouts would also be a fantastic addition.
Website: github.com/fooyin/fooyin
Support:
Developer: Luke Taylor
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
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