Replace lollypop with decibels (or other music/audio player)

As lollypop is still using gtk3, it can be slow in some devices with weaker cpu So maybe it is a good idea to see if we can replace it, i'll list some apps we can look at

• Decibels (Simple audio player) (Typescript)
• Gapless (GTK4 Music player) (Vala)
• Amberol (Simple music player) (Rust)

It's important to know if we want to ship a music player, or an audio player, as the approach could change

IMO, most of the cases the people would expect to have an audio player by default, and if they want to listen music they'll search for a client for it (Muzika, Amberol, Spot, etc)

By Pan Ortiz on 2024-09-25T11:52:28

There is also GNOME music even in GNOME core. But I've no idea weather it suits mobile phones well.

By fossdd on 2024-09-23T20:33:42

That could be a good option, i though it was unmantained, but it's even using the new dialogs and stuff, the problem is that it doesn't fit the minimum size to be able to fit a mobile device, i could check it and see if i can fix it (tho i didn't test anything else beside the dialogs as it doesn't detect my music for some reason)

By Pan Ortiz on 2024-09-24T01:53:35

Decibels would be the most straight-forward replacement, even if providing less features. Unfortunately, I'm waiting for https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/Incubator/decibels/-/issues/97 to package it in alpine (same goes for Showtime!). Having a more complex music player would be nice, but I'm also unsure which one to choose. GNOME Music is in Core but not being developed, Amberol is in Circle, but actively receives love, so the choice should be between those two. Do you have a preference?

Also, thanks for opening the issue to start the discussion!

By Pablo Correa Gomez on 2024-09-24T10:19:14

I use Amberol on my desktop for some time now, its UI scales nicely for phones as well. Amberol is a music player for a music collection while Decibels seems to be an audio player for single audio files?

By Dylan Van Assche on 2024-09-24T16:57:55

Yeah, exactly. Both of them are complementary

By Pablo Correa Gomez on 2024-09-24T17:12:02

I also think Decibels would be the best option (IMO), as most people would choose their favorite for playing music, Amberol has more features than Decibels, but it has less features than Lollypop, Gapless or GNOME Music, but most people would use something like Spotify or YouTube music, so, yeah... i think we are better by choosing something that is well mantained and has enough features like Decibels

By Pan Ortiz on 2024-09-24T22:48:01

@pabloyoyoista couldn't you use the Gitlab release tarballs instead for the meantime. The GNOME Infra team are working towards a new method to upload tarballs to download.gnome.org that doesn't involve giving every project's contributors full access to SSH there, and they believe(d) it would be better if we wait for that method.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/Incubator/decibels/-/releases would work, as I assume that's manually uploaded after generating the tarball with meson dist? What's really important for packaging in alpine is that we get a meson dist tarball and not what gitlab automatically generates from tags, as that's missing vendored deps, or submodules, and the packaging becomes extremely painful

So, more clearly. If that's generated with meson dist, it works for us. But please, for next release keep sticking to publishing it there in the same way, else it'll be a pain for us

I assume that's manually uploaded after generating the tarball with meson dist

Oh, I didn't know that meson dist is necessary. The tarballs on Gitlab are actual "Source Code", so I think it won't do.

for next release keep sticking to publishing it there in the same way

Yeah, I think it's better to wait for the download.gnome.org method

Alright, that's a shame. Looking forward for this to be possible then And thanks a lot for following up here!

I packaged now decibels downloading the actual source code and the source code of the subprojects used. This method is not ideal, but i think it's fine for now.

If you move it to community (so builds in pmOS testing don't fail), happy to merge an MR to add it by default

Yep, tested it again and should work fine. Maybe it won't get in on time for 3.21, but thats fine. https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/merge_requests/75426

Okay, the Alpine MR got merged and I opened !5824 (merged)

added discussion ui-gnome ui-gnome-mobile labels

assigned to @pabloyoyoista

By Robert Eckelmann on 2024-09-23T23:51:52

mentioned in merge request !5824 (merged)

closed with merge request !5824 (merged)

mentioned in commit 78a03479

mentioned in issue #3544