Add More Layouts To gMusicBrowser With gMusicBrowser-Art

gMusicBrowser is a very interesting music player that is very easy to customize. As you probably know, it will replace Exaile in Xubuntu (starting with Xubuntu 11.04).

gMusicBrowser Art is a project that provides some cool new layouts as well as an Awoken notification area icon.

Here are some screenshots:

In the above screenshot you can see the Arkanoid2 player layout and the Arkanoid try tip layout.

Here's another screenshot using a layout that makes gMusicBrowser look like Audacious:

And finally, a screenshot featuring Arkanoid2 skinned (for how to use an image to skin Arkanoid2, see this page on DeviantArt):

(screenshot via Deviantart)

You can find a lot more screenshots @ DeviantArt.

Install gMusicBrowser Art

To use gMusicBrowser Art, you'll need the latest gMusicBrowser from the ShimmerProject PPA. Check out the following post for installation instructions: Install gMusicBrowser 1.1.6 In Ubuntu.

The gMusicBrowser Art code is available at GitHub but if you use Ubuntu 10.10, there's a PPA you can add to easily install gMusicBrowser Art:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:andreas-boettger/gmusicbrowser-art
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gmusicbrowser-art

If you use some other Ubuntu version (10.04 or 11.04), you can try to install the .deb manually - get it from the PPA.

Once installed, head over to the gMusicBrowser preferences and you'll find some new layouts (on the Layouts tab). To get the cool "Arkanoid" tray you can see in the first screenshot, select "Arkanoid tray" under "Tray tip window layout". To get an Awoken notification area icon, check the "Show tray icon" box and select the icon theme under it.

gMusicBrowser To Replace Exaile In Xubuntu 11.04

WebUpd8 reader Tinhed who is a long time Xubuntu user let us know that gMusicBrowser will replace Exaile in Xubuntu 11.04.

gMusicBrowser will probably use the Shimmer interface by default (as we've seen in our last gMusicBrowser post, this amazing music player comes with lots of layouts) but with some further tweaks which include sort-by-artist mode for mosaic, rename the layouts, make a netbook layout and more:

(Shimmer Layout - SongTree View)

(Shimmer Layout - Mosaic View)

Here is a screenshot with the netbook layout:

gMusicBrowser is not yet default in Xubuntu, but it can be installed by using the Shimmer PPA. Instructions can be found HERE.

The news comes from yesterday's Xubuntu Community Team meeting which also reveals that LightDM is considered to replace GDM (not decided for now).

The meeting also raised the problem of XFCE PPAs - there are currently no official XFCE PPAs (at least not for XFCE 4.8) however no decision to create an official PPA has been taken yet.

Thanks to Tinhed for the tip and Simon Steinbeiß for the gMusicBrowser netbook layout screenshot; via xflinux

Install gMusicBrowser 1.1.6 In Ubuntu

(Shimmer Layout - SongTree View)

gMusicBrowser is a Linux music player that is designed for large music libraries (more then 10.000 songs). It upports ogg vorbis, mp3 and flac files (and mpc/ape with gstreamer or mplayer) and has some very interesting features such as multiple and customizable views, simple mass-tagging and mass-renaming with a fully featured tag editor, customizable labels can be set to each song as well as the features all the other music players have.

Have you tried gMusicBrowser recently? I somehow forgot to add its PPA when I've upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat so I've missed the recent development; gMusicBrowser 1.1.6 was released last month and it looks better then ever thanks to the widgets reorganization (which used to look a bit messy) - but that's not all that's new in the latest 1.1.6!

Firstly, here are some more gMusicBrowser 1.1.6 screenshots:

(Shimmer Layout - Mosaic View)

(QuodLibet-like Layout)

("With playlist" layout)

("With tabbedlist" layout)

(itunes-like layout)

gMusicBrowser 1.1.6 changelog:

• small change to gmbrc file (don't go back to a previous version or you will lose your artist/album pictures)
• rename a number of widgets, the old name will still work
• fix trayicon not transparent (depends on the panel used, breaks transparency on some, seems it will eventually works for all panels)
• LabelTime widget improvement 
• more "activate" options for SongTree, SongList and FilterPanes (and fixes)
• some lyrics fixes and add font and justification option
• add optional SuggestionMenu to SimpleSearch
• change the click behavior of TimeSlider and VolumeSlider, use option step_mode=1 to keep the old behavior
• add "Recent songs include skipped songs that haven't been played" option
• make all backends behave the same when seeking while paused
• mass-tagging dialog : change widget for genres and labels
• change the way songs are counted as played/skipped and add options
• change handling of http connections (use wget or AnyEvent::HTTP if found)
• add support for custom filename formats in mass-tagging dialog
• fixes for reading of ape files info
• ape tags are now case-insensitive
• support edition of embedded pictures in ogg and flac files
• add "Start in tray" option
• FilterPane mosaic mode: add options to display info next to picture or below it
• add text format options for album/artist FilterLists
• add Show and Hide commands, make Show the default command when an instance is already running
• improve artist splitting options, and make changing the option immediate
• add option to find guest artist in song titles such as : "songname (feat. artistname)"
• make rating stars part of the icon theme, the number of stars now depends on the number of stars files found
• fix HP/VP resizing issues
• add "auto-select pictures" for albums
• add optional fields, custom fields and field options
• update French, Swedish and Spanish translations and add Portuguese and Czech translations
• add MPRIS v1 plugin
• add artistinfo plugin
• add elementary icon theme

Install gMusicBrowser 1.1.6 in Ubuntu

To add the Shimmer project PPA and install the latest gMusicBrowser in Ubuntu Lucid, Maverick or Natty, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shimmerproject/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gmusicbrowser

Once installed, you switch between the three Shimmer layout views by clicking the "Simple view", "Songtree view" and "Mosaic view" buttons on the top right corner of the window. To use a completely different layout, go to Settings > Layouts and change the "Player window Layout" to whatever you want.

Install gMusicBrowser 1.1.5 In Ubuntu [Great Linux Music Player!]

gMusicBrowser is not just another music player - it's an amazing application which works great with large music collections!

Even though there have been no official releases in quite some time, there are development builds available (which are quite stable) via a PPA for Ubuntu.

So what's new in gMusicBrowser development builds (1.1.5 - latest at the time of writing this post)? Well, a lot! For start, a new interface is used by default (called shimmer) and a great-looking tree view:

Also, now gMusicBrowser supports gapless playback with Gstreamer, got a new "desktop widgets", eye-candy options to Cover/ArtistPic widgets and lots more - a complete list of changes can be found here (all the changes on that page are new since the latest stable version is 1.0.2).

And of course, all the old features are still present in gMusicBrowser. What I like the most is the way you can modify the interface to suit your needs. Here's an interlace with a completely different functionality than the default one:

Being a development build, gMusicBrowser 1.1.5 is not finished yet so a few things don't work:

• the auto-finding of covers for albums during collection scans is not implemented yet
• filter edition/description : not updated yet, so only works with filters that already existed
• genre/label edition in song(s) properties : the widget needs lots of improvements
• and probably some bugs too

But considering the improvements in the latest gMusicBrowser, I'd say: go for it and upgrade. I've only been using it for a couple of hours but I'm loving it already.

To install gMusicBrowser 1.1.5 (development) in Ubuntu Karmic or Lucid, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shimmerproject/ppa && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgtk2-mozembed-perl gmusicbrowser

Gmusicbrowser 1.0.2 Released

Gmusicbrowser, one of the best music players for Linux was updated to version 1.0.2. If you read Web Upd8 constantly, you must have heard of it by now.

1.0.2 changelog:

- updated fetch_cover and lyrics plugins
- updated translations : de fr
- new translation : zh_CN
- added support for reading pictures in flac files
- add "Now Playing" support for last.fm
- new plugin : notify
- new layout : 'Tabbed Lists, Library & Context'
- add support for using ogg123 to play flac files
- improved the Makefile
- Implement "CopyFields" DBus function
- fix accumulation of mplayer processes if -cache option enabled by using -nocache option
- fix to support amixer controls with spaces in their name
- other small fixes

Download gmusicbrowser 1.0.2 (packages available for Ubuntu (.deb and repository), Mandriva, Fedora, Archlinux and Gentoo)