include a more featureful music player in GNOME installs by default

!5824 (merged) replaced lollypop with decibels, but decibels is like really barebones and does practically nothing that I'd expect a phone music player app to do (playlists, browsing music collections by i3dtag, shuffling, etc)

I don't think we should go back to lollypop, moving it to gtk4 seems to be stuck at the RiiR stage: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/lollypop/-/issues/3037#note_2254585

Is there something better? #3198 (closed) mentions Amberol (from Emmanuele), is there any reason why that wasn't chosen? cc @fossdd @pabloyoyoista

just gave amberol a spin, it's a bit too basic for my taste too, though better than decibels... hmm.

Originally I packaged Amberol in Alpine with the intent of replacing Lollypop with it for what it's worth. I didn't end up doing it because Rust + GTK 4 apps were broken on 32-bit ARM at the time, but this has since been fixed to my understanding.

In https://apps.gnome.org we only have Amberol and GNOME Music. The status of music might not be great, though at least it's GTK4. I'd prefer to choose among those.

makes sense. I tried to start GNOME music but got some error about tracker not running... more stuff to enable for systemd I guess

I got localsearch/tracker running with !6194 (merged), however GNOME music just seems to be stuck on the first screen that says "welcome" and "the contents of your music folder will appear here". I have ~12K audio files in ~/Music so I'd expect at least something to show up...

also the UI seem to be a tad too wide for the OP6, the 'close' button at the top right is drawn mostly off the display

I used Amberol in the past and it was really convenient to use. Amberol has a +1 by me.

Decibels is only a audio player and not a music player. (See the discussion here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/app-mockups/-/issues/96#note_1858765)

So yeah I'm fine with adding also a music player.

I use and like this one: https://gitlab.gnome.org/neithern/g4music It uses GTK4, supports browsing music collections by i3dtag and shuffling. I didn't find playlists yet but it is listed as feature.

+1 for Gapless.

Unlike Decibels (which is soon going to rebrand to "Audio Player") and Amberol it does the library thing, meaning you can play your local music just from the app without first opening a file (Amberol, Decibels) or folder (Amberol). And unike Music, it fits 360px mobile screens.

FuriLabs also picked as a default for FuriOS, imho rightfully so.

Another vote for Gapless.

I've been trying a lot of music players in the past few weeks/months.

Amberol:

• doesn't support Musepack
• doesn't support AAC
• doesn't fit on small screens (bq-paella)

Lollypop:

• crashes when trying to filter by Genres right after program start
• wastes a lot of space on eye candy

Rhythmbox:

• works almost well on rather big and high-res screens (oneplus-enchilada, oneplus-fajita, xiaomi-beryllium), but one is always aware it's not meant for these screens

Quodlibet:

• basically the same as with Rhythmbox, although I believe it might be slightly better suited for big phones
• unfortunately I can't be certain, because right now it suffers from a fatal dependency issue in Alpine

All this made me fall back to CLI players:

cmus:

• in principle works really well, once you have accepted using a CLI player and keyboard input. It even has mpris (top menu) integration
• unfortunately it sometimes gets confused with the tags of my rather heterogeneous music collection and sorts the library the wrong way or even creates double entries

moc:

• also works pretty well, at least on big screens. on small screens the UI crashes with a ...TERMINAL TOO SMALL... message when the terminal gets resized (keyboard popup, screen rotation)
• it has no mpris integration. an mpris-fork seems to exist, but I've been told this is not working under Phosh.

Then I stumbled upon this issue and tried Gapless:

• supports mp3, ogg/vorbis, Musepack, AAC
• fits the screen / doesn't waste space
• mpris integration
• fast library update monitoring

I found three points I'm not totally happy with in Gapless, though:

• on bq-paella (but not on the three sdm845 devices mentioned above) it draws artifacts, usually in the form of horizontal and vertical green lines
• it doesn't display track numbers
• it sorts somewhat surprisingly (e.g. it sorts by "performer" and "albumartist" (if available) not by "artist")

IMO music players are very opinionated and users usually choose one depending on their needs, decibels was chosen not as a music player but as an audio player, but if a music player needs to be shipped (alongside decibels), i think Gapless is the best choice

added discussion label