Ymuse is a modern, open source Music Player Daemon (MPD) client written in GTK and Go.
As a frontend to MPD, Ymuse offers a clean, straightforward window through which to browse, manage, and stream your music. Responsive and lightweight, Ymuse is apparently able to handle a 12,000+ track playlist with more ease than Sonata, another popular GTK MPD client.
To be clear: Ymuse is a frontend to MPD. It is not a music player itself. Thus, you need MPD set up and configured correctly on your system in order to use this it. And no, this isn’t a ‘user friendly MPD set-up wizard’ either!
If you run MPD on your local machine (with default port and no password) Ymuse connects automatically as soon as you launch it. For more exotic configurations you can can edit the network, host, port and password directly in Ymuse > Preferences > General — a nice touch.
Ubuntu users looking for an MPD client that is actively maintained, doesn’t look dated, and works well on even low-end system should definitely give Ymuse a spin.
You can learn more about this app’s features in the video at the start of this post (which won’t show if you read from an RSS reader or scraper site, alas). Alternatively, pass your peepers over the following condensed summary for more about it’s capable of:
- Connect to local or remote MPD server
- MPD library browse and search functions
- See, sort, and shuffle play queue
- Filter play queue
- Track scrubbing
- Save play queue as a new or existing playlist
- Disable/enable queue columns
- Player title settings
- Toggles for shuffle, repeat, consume
- File rescanning
At the time of writing there’s no support for album or track artwork in the track browser (a la some of the fancy macOS MPD clients) but you can see cover art for the actively playing song (assuming it has artwork, of course).
Want to try it out?
Ymuse is free, open source software available for all major Linux distributions. You can download the latest versions from the project website in a choice of .deb, .rpm, and a snap package is also available.
To learn what else is on on the to-do list for this app, file bugs, or dive in to help development you can head over to the Ymuse on Github.
In short, YMuse is a solid alternative to the likes of Cantata, Sonata, and the ncmpdpp terminal app (among many other fine MPD clients and players) and one you’d be remiss to not try.
Kudos to Dmitry for letting me know about his app. If you’re working on an app, tool, extension, or utility don’t hesitate to get in touch via the Got News? link in the header.