Summary
A minimalist music player is appealing in many respects if you’re looking for distraction-free music enjoyment. There are lots of things that PQMusic does well, but it’s definitely a work-in-progress.
We encountered nasty bugs running PQMusic built from the AUR and with the latest AppImages on both Manjaro and Ubuntu systems. While the AppImage versions would play mp3 files, the vast majority of our FLAC albums refused to play on either distro.
Hopefully this critical bug will be fixed in a future release. We will revisit the software then. If you’ve got PQMusic running reliably on Manjaro or Ubuntu, please share your wizardry in the comments section below.
Website: github.com/son-link/PQMusic
Support:
Developer: Alfonso Saavedra
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
PQMusic is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Memory Usage
Page 4 – Summary
Thanks, I like DeaDBeeF
Yes, we like DeaDBeeF too, it scored fairly highly in our music players roundup.
DeaDBeeF: almost as fun to type as it to listen
Another software application with just a stupid name
Much software development seems to be fairly pointless.
We have small players already. DeaDBeeF plays anything, Audacious is nicer on KDE, QMMP is cute, Strawberry is great for opening a folder> opens in new playlist… and many others.
We have amazing features – looking at Guayadeque, which is now dying – but which has the MOST convenient Lyrics (autosearch, click to search, click to open search in browser – copy paste and save text to the track), as well as a superb playlists functionality, superb filtering and Smartplay, and many features lacking in most new players.
Why aren’t NEW players interested to bring forward the best functions? Maybe New developers are just too lazy to research before they design…
Ben, you make some interesting points. Linux is very strong in some areas (such as music players) and yet very weak in many other software genres. Points to bear in mind:
– Open source developers have no obligation to include things like filtering and smartplay or other features some people deem important. Many projects start out with a developer wanting a music player that meets their needs, which obviously won’t necessarily accord with others.
– Define best functions? Someone may want gapless playback or refined playlists, someone else wants things like an equalizer. Adding everything under the sun is likely to result in a bloated program with tons of bugs. It’s much harder to maintain complex software particularly for a sole developer.
– Some features are harder to code than others. Many open source developers are coding in their spare time, they are going to focus on what is important to them
– Some developers take donations, they may be willing to add features that some users want if there’s a financial incentive to do so. Unfortunately, so many people leech, never helping financially with any open source project (or even in some other way). When you look at a project’s GitHub many music players code is written almost exclusively by a single person.
– A developer writes a program for different reasons e.g. they may write a music player to help them learn a new language or toolkit.
– You say Guayadeque is dying. I’ve never tried that one. Assuming it’s open source, there’s nothing to stop anyone from forking the project and carrying on with the project.