Harmonoid

Review: Harmonoid – music app

Last Updated on March 13, 2022

In Operation

By default the program indexes the ~/Music folder, but doesn’t transverse sub-directories. As our music collection is is held in subfolders of ~/Music, the software started with an empty collection. The first thing we’ll do is add a collection by accessing Settings (that’s the cog icon in the top right hand corner).

Here’s an image of Harmonoid in action with a small music collection added.

Harmonoid
Click image for full size

The playback user interface is reasonably well designed. Our initial impressions were really heightened by the software’s aesthetics. But remember the idiom “never to judge a book by its cover”. This also applies to software.

Harmonoid
Click image for full size

How does the music player perform in operation? In a single word, adequate.

We always consider a music player must have gapless playback. Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. It’s essential if you listen to classical, electronic music, concept albums, and progressive rock. There’s a few Linux music players that don’t offer gapless playback.

Sadly Harmonoid falls into the minority camp bereft of gapless playback. That’s a showstopper in our book.

Besides its music library management based on metadata tags, there’s a reasonable range of features with the program supporting lyrics, playlists, searching your collection, and YouTube playback. The latter feature currently appears broken with the program failing to fetch audio streams.

Next page: Page 3 – Memory Usage

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Memory Usage
Page 4 – Summary

17 Comments
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Michael
Michael
2 years ago

YouTube playback didn’t work for me either.

Rooster
Rooster
2 years ago

I’ve been using Clementine for years. It has a superb feature set, perfect for listening to internet radio, and works under Linux, macOS and Windows and even control the software from my cell phone.

Jymmn
Jymmn
2 years ago
Reply to  Rooster

I agree, Clementine is the beat music player yet.

Simon
Simon
2 years ago

Based on the article alone, feels like a language learning project creator wants to try and milk. No harm in that, the creator will learn some valuable lessons about reality

Dan
Dan
2 years ago
Reply to  Simon

learn about reality? I doubt it. More likely they will learn some programming

Hitesh Kumar Saini
Hitesh Kumar Saini
2 years ago

Hey! I see you recently published this article… And I see it’s using the non-updated version… Flatpak release is not yet updated… The whole UI is revamped compared to what you have actually shown.
Atleast you could match the UI… Very bad review & research.
Plus, project is not even 1.0.0 stable yet.
The old version that you reviewed already has all its libraries open source.
Install again & review again. Flatpak version isn’t updated & I didn’t expect people can’t even match version numbers.

Derrick
Derrick
2 years ago

I looked at the latest release and it’s utter shite. Prime to crashing,memory hog and poorly implemented

Hitesh Kumar Saini
Hitesh Kumar Saini
2 years ago
Reply to  Derrick

Unfortunately we are so far from 1.0.0, current version is just 0.2.0… and project is at infancy. there have been barely 3 versions out yet (that even randomly “releasing” on my GitHub README)…

Justin "Zorro" Booth
Justin "Zorro" Booth
2 years ago

It’s a common mistake by developers that giving version numbers confers any real information about the maturity of a project given there is often inconsistency about version numbers between different projects.

I have seen many open source projects that have releases below version 1.0 that are very stable with all main features implemented and settled APIs, and even things like MAME which has in development for 25 years where the developers have said they can never actually release a version 1.0.

Yet other software with version releases in double digits that have roadmaps indicating there are many key features yet to be implemented.

Freddy
Freddy
2 years ago

Open source projects that plan to include proprietary plugins/addons generally see their project receive significantly less support from the open source community particularly where there is mature open source projects doing the same thing already available.

There are many projects that tried this approach where it spectacularly backfired. For example, there was a file manager called Polo File Manager. I used it as my main file manager. The developer tried to offer plugins for money saying that they were available if you made a specific monetary donation. The open source community, of course, saw right through that approach. It wasn’t a donation at all.

What happened to Polo? As an open source project it died a horrible death. Abandoned by the original developer and shunned by the open source community.

Ali
Ali
2 years ago
Reply to  Freddy

Polo got to version 18 something and the developer was still labelling it as beta

Damien
Damien
2 years ago

Heh Luke

Thanks for the honest review. Your coverage of the multimedia software has saved me a lot of time

Noberto
Noberto
2 years ago

I note that the project has changed license terms in the past few days. It is no longer published under the GPL. Instead its EULA now says

(g) Source code.
You may only compile and modify the source code of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT for your own personal purpose or to propose a contribution to the SOFTWARE PRODUCT after removing refrences (sic) to all proprietary modules used within Harmonoid.

The software does not meet the criteria of an open source project. Avoid!

Bjoern
Bjoern
2 years ago
Reply to  Noberto

Indeed, Harmonoid is just grubby freeware.

HJ
HJ
2 years ago
Reply to  Noberto

It’s the classic bait-and-switch technique. Start a project, release it under an open source license, try to build a user base, and then remove the open source license for new releases. Disgusting behavior