Last Updated on May 19, 2022
In Operation
Here’s the obligatory image of the software in action.
The interface is clean and uncluttered. Below the menu entries are standard playback buttons (previous track, pause/play, stop, next track), a track slider, repeat options, and a volume slider. Below, you see the track entries. And you can filter tracks. The software also offers playlist functionality.
Adding tracks is easy. Just drag and drop folders or tracks into the software’s pane.
There’s a few setting you can tweak such as the option to continue playback in the background after exiting the software.
Any music player worth its salt offers 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. Fortunately courtesy of xmms2d, LXMusic benefits from gapless playback.
Memory Usage
LXMusic uses xmms2d, so when comparing memory usage, we need to take into account both software. LXMusic consumes around 32MB of RAM, and xmms2d uses around 28MB of RAM, so that’s 60MB of RAM in total. How does that compare with other music players?
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
“The software isn’t under active development.”
Last release was lxmusic-0.4.7.tar.xz on 2016-02-21 which was almost 4 years ago.
As LXDE and its components has been superceded by LXQt and Qt based applications, it could be inferred that development of LXMusic is not just inactive but has been abandoned.
That’s not necessarily the case. I’ve seen tons of open source projects where the original developer(s) has long since departed, but someone else comes along and takes on the mantle. That’s the beauty of open source software.
The code quality looks fairly polished and understandable. It appears like a good project for someone to takeover and continue development. I’d contribute a few commits if there’s a maintainer out there.