When GNOME 48 is released in March it will debut with a brand-new audio player.
Per a recent merge request, Decibels graduates from GNOME Incubator to GNOME Core Apps as part of GNOME 48, making the software something GNOME recommends downstream Linux distributions include to give users a fully-featured GNOME experience.
You may be familiar with or even using Decibels already. I wrote about the app in late 2023, and it’s been available to install from Flathub for almost as long.
For anyone not familiar with it, Decibels is a no-frills audio player designed for the GNOME desktop (but can run on any DE). Its sole purpose is to play back audio files, be it music, podcasts, lecture notes, sound effects, etc.
Decibels is not a music manager like Rhythmbox or GNOME Music are. It can (obviously) be used to listen to music files but with no library, track browser, folder watching, tag editor, album art, etc there is better software suited to that task.
But for the simple purpose of playing back audio, it does everything it needs, with waveform display, scrubbable seek-bar, playback speed controls, app-specific volume slider, and handy 10 and 30 second forward/back buttons.
In keeping with apps in Core, Decibels is renamed based on its function, so becomes Audio Player (as Nautilus is Files, Evince is Document Viewer, Epiphany is Web, etc).
GNOME’s Core Apps follow GNOME design guidelines, share the same underlying tech, accessibility standards, and integrate with the desktop environment as a whole. Together they form a set of focused, easy-to-use apps catering to computing needs.
But they’re not mandatory; Linux distributions are free to ship other apps if they want. Ubuntu doesn’t currently ship with Loupe as its default image viewer, instead sticking with its predecessor Eye of GNOME.
So while there’s a chance Ubuntu 25.04 may package and ship Decibels in its expanded installation option, there’s arguably no need: Totem media player comes preinstalled (as the default app for opening audio files) alongside Rhythmbox.
Not that you need to wait.
Decibels is free, open-source software available to install from Flathub.