Qoob

Yarock – excellent Qt music player with browsing based on cover art

Last Updated on February 2, 2023

Yarock is billed as “a modern looking music player, packed with features, that doesn’t depend on any specific desktop environment”.

Yarock is designed to provide an easy and pretty music browser based on cover art. Yarock is easy to build with a minimal set of dependencies, and offers the choice of different audio backends (Phonon, vlc, and mpv).

Installation

The developer, Sebastien Amardeilh, doesn’t provide any official support for Linux packages. Sebastien instead recommends either compiling the source code, or to use unofficial packages. Repositories for popular Linux distributions carry Yarock, so you can choose the easy path. But heh, life’s not meant to be easy (Ed – speak for yourself buddy). So using all my compiling wizardry (currently the size of a postage stamp) I proceeded as follows:

Download the latest compressed tarball from the project’s Launchpad’s page (there’s a link in the Summary page). Then type at a shell:

$ tar zxvf Yarock_1.3.1_Sources.tar.gz
$ cd Yarock_1.3.1_Sources
$ cd build
$ cmake ..

The final command didn’t complete successfully, as my system was missing htmlcxx, a non-validating CSS1 and HTML parser for C++. After installing the parser, cmake .. command generated the build files. Next, compile the code with:

$ make

Success. A final optional step is to sudo make install.

After you’ve installed the software, you’re prompted to setup your music collection directory. Depending on the amount of music stored in that directory, it takes forever and a day to update the music database and media information. With a large collection, best bake a cake.

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Streaming
Page 4 – Other Features
Page 5 – Summary

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