Summary
Nora doesn’t come anywhere near to meriting our recommendation. There are so many better music players available for Linux.
Nora has a fairly impressive feature set and on the whole sports an impressive UI. However, we always prefer substance over style. As things stand, the program currently has too many issues. The biggest failing is the lack of gapless playback. Music folder implementation is also woeful. From our testing, Nora often forgets music folders added to the library particularly with large collections.
As you’d expect from an Electron-based program, Nora is not lightweight in its memory footprint. With our standard small MP3 library of Creative Commons licensed music, Nora consumes around 484MB of RAM according to ps_mem. That’s not an unsurprising result but it’s pretty meh.
Nora certainly shows promise. It’s better than the majority of Electron-based music players we’ve tried. So we’ll be keeping tabs on its development. If the developer adds gapless playback, we’ll certainly pen an updated review.
Website: noramusic.netlify.ap
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Sandakan Nipunajith
License: MIT License
Nora is written in TypeScript. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Settings
Page 4 – Summary
Electron = bloat
There are a lot of design decisions which have to be made by a developer when starting a project. It’s so important to start from a good foundation.
So often, poor decisions at the start really hamper a project. Nora’s developer seems stymied adding gapless playback because of a poor choice of framework.
I don’t recall seeing Electron-based music players offering gapless playback. At least I’ve never seen one, but maybe there is?
A shame that Electron was chosen. It’s such an awful framework.
I will continue to use a WINAMP type clone, under linux. I rather have simple and nice looks. For video, VLC is the one. Most linux are too bloated with options. That maybe okay for a new user, but a hard user a stripper option need to be offered. As in the newer DEBIAN install, One can do a base desktop install with no extra fluff software. A APT install will get you all needed tools and toys. Bloat can be a good learning thing for a new user, to see and use other options. But a hard core user doesn’t need the fluff.
VLC is bloated for video (and terrible for audio as it doesn’t even have gapless playback).
mpv is definitely superior for video.