musical-notes

Melody – music player written in Vala

Last Updated on September 3, 2020

In Operation

Here’s an image of Melody in action depicting the Albums view. You can also view by Artists, and Tracks. There’s a separate view for Playlists, and Radio Stations.

Melody

The software doesn’t have the best handling of covers and images. About half of my library is missing covers, and the player is limited in adding them. I really like the MusicBrainz integration that Melody offers, but a few of my albums had wrong information. There’s no way of correcting the false information from the software other than the name and cover art.

You might notice the interface doesn’t offer a volume slider. Whether that’s good design is debatable, but it might be an important omission for you.

The range of features is fairly limited. That’s actually not a negative criticism. Too many players offer pointless frippery like graphic equalizers, and visualization effects. In my eyes, this only serves as an unnecessary distraction. If you need to boost certain frequencies, things are awry with your music hardware setup. Get a better sound card, upgrade your speakers or their positioning, rather than employ some artificial tweak. Rant over!

One of the essential attributes I require is support for gapless playback. In political parlance, it’s a red line I won’t cross. 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 an essential feature if, like myself, you listen to classical, electronic music, concept albums, and progressive rock. Probably 10% of my music collection is ruined without gapless playback. Sadly, Melody doesn’t support gapless playback.

On the plus side, the software is stable in operation, runs sweetly, and I like the interface which is well thought-out.

There’s support for playing audio CDs which works quite well. You can set the album cover for each CD.

Next page: Page 3 – Internet Radio

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Internet Radio
Page 4 – Memory Usage
Page 5 – Summary

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5 Comments
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Oli Jones
Oli Jones
4 years ago

Why do you keep plugging your Raspberry Pi blog?

Cœur Noir
Cœur Noir
4 years ago

Does it embed picture of cover inside the file when possible – as Sayonara does ?

This is my first requirement ( I love my music to keep its face whatever device I play it on ). Never understood why such a feature is so rare in Linux realm. Gapless playback my second requirement, though.

Clive Emerson
Clive Emerson
4 years ago
Reply to  Cœur Noir

Embedding pictures is unimportant for most users. Isn’t embedding pictures for mp3/id3v2 only? Any self-respecting music enthusiast listens to lossless formats like FLAC.

Michael
Michael
3 years ago

It is not possible to rip audio CDs to mp3 with Melody, isńt it?