A new version of Turntable, the universal music scrobbling tool and ‘now playing’ desktop widget for Linux is out with a couple of cool new features.
As the app is a conduit to relay your listening habits to other services, this update adds a simple “wrapped year-in-review” style recap of said listening habits.
Turntable’s developer, Evangelos Paterakis, cautions that the year-end recap feature, accessed from the player’s settings panel, is an ‘experiment’ so far from perfect.
The reason things aren’t perfect? Because Turntable doesn’t log what you play itself, simply sends it to your preferred service, e.g., Last.fm, Libre.fm, etc.
As “different services provide different levels of information and assets and almost none provide a reliable way to get cover and artist images”.
Turntable’s wrapped, pulling from my Last.fm account, showed the correct stats, but not for the past year: for my entire 19 years of scrobbling music. As much as I love my #1 Artist (pictured above), I didn’t spend 2025 listening listen to them 32 times a day…
Still, it’s a nice feature. Other music logging services may feed it a suitable window of data to serve up, providing a lick of insight (and, no doubt, a few “oh wow… did I really listen to THAT so much this year?!”) moments.
If you use Turntable to scrobble the music you listen to via local music files, this is a nice way to get an end of year retrospective similar to those made popular by music streaming services (and since aped by seemingly everything – even my supermarket loyalty card has one).
Collapsible player controls
The neatest (literally) new feature in Turntable 5.0: collapsible media controls. If you just want to see album art on your desktop while you’re working for a cleaner look, or would prefer to access media controls as/when required, this is neat.
It works with all layouts, orientations and configurations, including the spinning ‘tone arm’ layout, pictured above.
Other changes:
- Background portal support with autostart on boot
- Active music player auto-detected when opening Turntable
- Options reorganised
- Minor design tweaks
- Bug fixes
In all, a nice update to Turntable. The appeal of an app like this isn’t universal (I don’t pretend otherwise), but as someone who is almost always listening to music, has scrobbled to Last.fm since 2006, and can’t resist some desktop embellishment – it’s my new Linux apps of 2025, for sure.
Turntable does have a CLI, should you wish scrobble on a headless setup (or on desktop without the GUI showing at all). As it works with all MPRIS-enabled apps, you can skip setting up Last.fm or similar in each app you use, and funnel through this instead.