Normally Luke reviews music players but as he’s currently away I’ve taken a look at Nova Music in his absence. Luke will offer his verdict in the future.
Nova Music is a new music player written with the libcosmic toolkit, a GUI toolkit for creating COSMIC-themed applets and applications. But you don’t need to be running the COSMIC desktop environment.
The elephant in the room? OK, Linux has tons of music players available with some excellent GUI and terminal clients available. Does the platform need another new entrant? Well many said that about fooyin, but that small acorn has grown into a mighty oak.
Installation
I evaluated Nova Music by installing it with Flatpak.
Plain sailing with installation. That’s to be expected though as Flatpak makes installation very straightforward even though its sandboxing can cause a few issues for newcomers. In any event, I still prefer building source code. It’s fun and you learn lots along the way.
The full source code is available. There’s also a package available in the Arch User Repository for Arch and Arch-based distros.
In Operation
On the first run you’re invited to select your music folder, and scan it.
Here’s an image of Nova Music in action.
The interface is clean and simple to use. On the left hand side of the interface, you can view your music by individual tracks, albums, or artists. The Home entry lets you view, modify and play the playback queue.
The software lets you generate utf8 m3u playlists with the ability to choose an icon to display for each playlist. There’s metadata support.
Summary
The program is in a very early stage of development so it’s not fair to give a verdict at this stage. But it’s made a good start so far. A project definitely to watch and see how it develops. Luke will update you as the project matures.
The program is very easy to crash. For example, I’ve had that happen even when just trying to resize the window.
When playing an album the program just stops at the end of the track rather than just continuing with the next track in the album.. You need to add an album/track to the queue for playback to continue.
In terms of features, there are lots of improvements I could suggest but it seems the developer has a fairly good handle of what’s most useful. The most important thing missing is support for gapless playback, but that’s already on the developer’s radar. That’s actually a good sign. Its important that the foundations of a project are sound. For example, I’ve seen many developers make poor decisions when it comes to choosing frameworks and libraries which meant that adding things like gapless playback require a huge rewrite of the program.
I’d like to see support for multiple music directories.
With a small music library, ps_mem reports memory usage is around 182MB which is a bit on the high side for a music player particularly given its current limited feature set.
See Luke’s roundup of the finest graphical music players for more information. There’s a good chance Nova Music will be added to that roundup depending on its development.
Website: github.com/lunarsrl/NovaMusic
Support:
Developer: Samuel Rivero Luna
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Nova Music is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.