Foobnix: A Very Interesting New Local And Online Music Player For Linux

Foobnix is a brand new Linux music player designed to be minimal and for both local and online music.

What I instantly liked about it is the online music search feature - Foobnix downloads and plays music from Vkontakte (a Russian website, I for one never heard of it) and in my tests it was able to find any band I could think of (this includes some Romanian bands such as E.m.i.l. which I was sure it wouldn't find - but it did). Also, this service uses port 80 so if you have some ports blocked, it will still work. I'm not sure how legal this is, but it's an amazing feature!

Besides this online music search feature, Foobnix also comes with a lot of radio stations integrated by default (around 3500), Last.fm support, lyrics and a few other minor features.

The interface is also very interesting: the player controls and song progress bar are displayed next to the menu which give a touch of minimalism, uniqueness and appealing visuals to this new audio player.

But back to the online music feature: you can enable it by going to View > View Search Panel. You can also enable a related artists, similar songs, similar tags and album artwork by going to View > View Info Panel. Here, you can click any similar artist or similar song (info retrieved via Last.fm) and it will instantly play in Foobnix.

Unfortunately, Foobnix doesn't come with an AppIndicator, but it's approach to the notification area is quite interesting: right clicking the Foobnix notification area icon brings up a small control window:

Overall, Foobnix is a very interesting and promising music player with an unique interface which still needs a bit of work but is already usable.

Update: if the web music feature stops working, you can fix it by running the following command (will reset Foobnix!):

rm -r ~/.config/foobnix

Download Foobnix (Ubuntu .deb for both 32bit and 64bit included).