This is the first article in a series exploring the Raspberry Pi 5 used as a desktop Mini PC. Let’s kick off the series by seeing how the machine fares as a music player.
Linux offers a wide array of music players. Our current recommended open source music players are Tauon, fooyin, and musikcube. The first two sport a graphical user interface, the latter is a terminal-based affair. All three are superb music players offering all the essentials you want from a music player such as gapless playback, support for a wide range of audio formats (including FLAC), playlists, and much more.
None of these music players are available from Raspberry Pi OS’s package manager.
This article was written with a Raspberry Pi 5 housed in an attractive Pironman 5 Mini PC case from SunFounder. We’re using the 4GB RAM model of the Pi 5 with a 1TB NVMe running the Raspberry Pi OS.
Tauon
Tauon doesn’t provide an ARM package. But there’s an easy way to install the software courtesy of Flatpak. Even if you’re not interested in using Tauon, it’s definitely worth setting up Flatpak on the Pi 5. There’s so much great open source software available to install via Flatpak these days.
Install the Flatpak package:
$ sudo apt install flatpak
Add the Flatpak repository:
$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Restart the Pi 5.
Now we can install Tauon with the command:
$ flatpak install flathub com.github.taiko2k.tauonmb
A curiosity is that a menu entry for Tauon isn’t automatically added but it does appear after a restart. Or if you don’t want to restart the machine, go to Preferences / Menu Editor, go to Sound & Video, and untick and retick the entry for Tauon. Then the menu entry appears.
Here’s Tauon running. We’ve added a small collection of music albums published under a Creative Commons license just to give a flavour of the interface.
Fooyin
musikcube
musikcube’s developer provides ARM packages. The Pi 5 runs armv8, but the deb package is 32-bit and the developer doesn’t provide a 64-bit package. There’s no Flatpak available, nor a snap. In this situation, let’s try a manual build.
Install the program’s dependencies with the command:
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential clang cmake libogg-dev libvorbis-dev libavutil-dev libavformat-dev libswresample-dev libncursesw5-dev libasound2-dev libpulse-dev pulseaudio libmicrohttpd-dev libmp3lame-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libev-dev libssl-dev libtag1-dev libopenmpt-dev
Many of these packages were already installed on our Pi.
Clone the project’s GitHub repository.
$ git clone https://github.com/clangen/musikcube.git --recursive
Change into the newly created directory.
$ cd musikcube
Now we can build the program.
$ cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" .
$ make -j4
The -j4 speeds up the conpile time by using all four of the Pi 5’s cores.
The build completes successfully.
Now we can install the software.
$ sudo make install
Image of musikcube.
cmus
There’s a Flatpak available.
$ flatpak install flathub io.github.cmus.cmus