Review: Mellow – music player

Mellow is a local music player designed to provide an immersive, distraction-free listening experience.

The application places the currently playing track at the centre of the interface. Library browsing, queue management and configuration are moved into an overlay that remains hidden until needed. This lets the main window concentrate on album artwork, playback controls and the music itself.

Mellow is written in Rust and uses GTK 4, libadwaita and GStreamer.

This is free and open source software.

Installation

Installation is straightforward. The recommended method is to download the appropriate Flatpak bundle from the project’s GitHub releases page.

Separate bundles are provided for x86_64 and AArch64 systems. I downloaded the x86_64 build to my Downloads directory.

The following command installs Mellow for the current user. Root privileges are therefore not required.

$ flatpak install --user ~/Downloads/io.github.userwithaname.Mellow.x86_64.flatpak

Flatpak downloads any required runtime components and asks for confirmation before completing the installation. Once installed, Mellow can be launched from the desktop application menu.

In Operation

The main playback view keeps distractions to a minimum. Album artwork dominates the window, with the track title, artist and album shown underneath. Previous, pause and next controls sit above a seek bar displaying the elapsed and total playing time.

Clicking the three-dot button at the bottom opens Mellow’s secondary interface.

This view provides access to the music library, the playback queue and the application’s settings. Tracks are presented with their artwork, artist, duration and a clear indication of the current selection. Shuffle and repeat controls are available from the toolbar, while the tabs at the bottom switch between the Library, Playing and Settings sections.

Mellow therefore separates its interface into two distinct areas. The main player concentrates entirely on the current song, while browsing, queue management and configuration are kept out of sight until needed. The panel is closed using the button in its upper-right corner, returning to the stripped-back playback view.

The interface uses colours derived from the current album artwork. This gives each track a distinctive appearance without adding unnecessary interface elements.

Mellow offers the following features:

• Local music library browsing and playback.
• Gapless playback support. The Settings section lets you disable gapless playback. There is also an option for background playback.
• An editable playback queue.
• The ability to schedule a pause after a queued track.
• Shuffle and repeat playback modes.
• Custom tags for organising a music collection.
• Automatic discovery of files that have been moved or reorganised.
• Support for libraries stored on removable drives.
• Adaptive interface colours based on album artwork. Like gapless playback, this can be turned off in the Settings section.
• A responsive interface designed to handle large libraries.
• Keyboard shortcuts.

Mellow retains library information when a removable drive is disconnected. This avoids losing the associated catalogue data simply because the storage device is temporarily unavailable.

Custom tags provide an additional way of grouping music independently of its embedded metadata or directory layout. The queue can also be edited to control what plays next without disrupting the uncluttered main view.

Summary

Mellow takes a distinctive approach to local music playback. Instead of presenting the library, playlists and controls simultaneously, it hides secondary functions until they are required.

The adaptive presentation, gapless playback, editable queue and flexible library management make it more capable than its minimal interface initially suggests. Its separation of the current listening experience from library management works particularly well.

The software remains experimental and is under active development. Its design and features may therefore change, and configurations created by newer releases are not guaranteed to work with older versions.

ps_mem reports memory usage of approximately 610 MB. That is excessive for a music player, particularly when considerably more feature-rich alternatives, such as fooyin, consume significantly less memory.

Website: github.com/Userwithaname/mellow
Support:
Developer: Userwithaname
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

Mellow is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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