If you’ve been itching to try out the fancy-looking MPD client Euphonica, you’ll be pleased to hear it’s now available to install from Flathub.
Euphonica is written in Rust and uses a GTK4/libadwaita UI. It’s still in beta (thus not stable) yet feels solid enough in day-to-day use. Plus, development is active.
The arrival of the app on Flathub (though it’s not yet verified) will make it easier for people to try this out. When I covered it earlier this year, it got a lot of interest but the fact it had to be compiled from source on Ubuntu put it out of the reach of some.
Euphonica is a frontend for MPD (Music Player Daemon). You can’t install Euphonica and listen to music in it like you can with, say, Rhyhmbox. It has to connect to an MPD server that us up and running somewhere.
Many people run MPD on a dedicated media server setup on an old PC or a Raspberry Pi, etc. However, you can install and run MPD locally on the same machine you want to listen to music on as well (it’s what I do, and MPD is a background process).
While listening to music is the primary purpose of any audio player (MPD-based or otherwise), a slick UI centred around album art doesn’t hurt when browsing through collections to find something to listen to.
This app makes use of background blur (which looks especially pleasing in dark mode), has an an animated, live-updating spectrum analyser in the player control bar, and can display synced lyrics (with click-to-seek support). It’s a complete package.
I spotlighted Euphonica in July. It has the usual features one would expect in a MPD client: password-protected connection, reconnect toggle, database refresh/reload, support for playlists, reading tags and ratings, showing album art and so on.
But the real appeal of Euphonica is how it looks (shallow? sorry/not sorry). It looks unlike most MPD clients, and has several features and visual flourishes that lends it a distinct personality compared to traditional MPD clients like Audacious, Cantata and Ymuse:
- Integrated spectrum visualiser can be configured/disabled
- Album and artists art fetching via MusicBrainz or LastFM
- Synced lyric support (with click-to-seek) via LRCLIB
- Crossfade and MixRamp options in queue mode
- Bitrate readout and audio quality indicators
- Asynchronous search for large collections
- Queue ‘consume’ mode removes tracks after playing
- Volume dial (!) with dBFS readout option
- Statically-cached background blur powered by libblur
Some of those ‘flourishes’ are certain to be too extra for some people’s taste so configuration options are included to adjust, tweak or turn off feature, including the dancing spectrum in the play bar, and the album art background blur effect.
It has a few flaws too. When viewing an album I currently see a never-ending spinner next to album art, not, as intended, album/artist info/bio. A complete lack of drag and drop interactivity is jarring too, you can’t, for example, drag a track to the sidebar to drop it on the queue.
But as I said: this app is in beta. Issues will be ironed out and more features added as development continues — and given the progress so far, it’s certainly worth a spin.