YaRock - A Music Player Designed For Browsing Your Music Collection Based On Album Cover Art

(YaRock 0.0.28 album view)

YaRock is a new QT4 music player designed to provide a nice overview of your music by allowing you to browse your music collection based on the album cover art. Thanks to its multiple views: album, artist, track, genre or folder view, you can easily find an artist or album even with a large music collection (and if that's not enough, you can always use the built-in search). Depending on the view you're using, you can drag a whole album or just some tracks to the playlist on the right.

YaRock can fetch albums cover art from Last.fm or you can load it from a file - but unfortunately you must do this manually for each album. Hopefully an automatic way of doing this will be implemented in the future.

YaRock's main purpose is not to have a huge list of features, but to allow you to browse your music collection in a clear, visual pleasing way so don't expect too many features, at least not for now. The current features include:

• Music collection database (SQLite 3)
• Browse your local music collection (by artists, albums, genre)
• Easy search and filter music collection
• Manage favorites item (album, artist)
• Play music from Collection or Playlist
• Simple Playlist
• Support MP3, Ogg Vorbis,FLAC music files
• Download missing album cover art from Last.fm
• Clean and simple user interface

(YaRock artist view)

In my test, YaRock worked quite well, except for a visual glitch for the track, collection and playlist info display (at the bottom of the player - you can notice this in the screenshots) but that's not something major. What I would like is last.fm/libre.fm scrobbling and options to save/load playlists. Once YaRock gets these features, it will become a great lightweight music player.

Unfortunately I don't know how YaRock works on a large music collection because I am in the process of copying my music collection from some old hard disks to my new hard disk, so I only have around 1000 music files on my computer at the time I'm writing this post.

Download YaRock 0.0.28

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat:

• 32bit
• 64bit

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx:

• 32bit
• 64bit

Or you can add the LFFL PPA and install it from there: for Ubuntu Lucid or Maverick.

Thanks to LFFL for the .debs and heads up on YaRock!