In addition to being a baller piece of desktop eye candy (a desktop music widget), Turntable is also a universal scrobbler for services like Last.fm and Libre.fm. The latest update adds improvements to both areas.
On the scrobbling side, Turntable’s developer, Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis (Tuba, Calligraphy), adds support for offline scrobbling in the 0.4 update. This logs your track listens when offline so you (choose to) submit them to when reconnected.
If you’ve ever lost logging 3 AM deep-dive music discoveries to dodgy WiFi, you’ll appreciate that!
The app also adds support for ‘now playing’ signals to services like Last.fm, i.e., metadata of the currently playing track to show live on your profile (it doesn’t affect scrobbling so four minutes or 50% of a track has to be listened to to count):
Glycin, GNOME’s Rust-based sandboxed, modular image-decoding library, is now used by Turntable, bolstering the range of image formats it can load. A handful of memory leaks have been addressed, and Flatpak permissions1 added for more players and browsers.
The in-app scrobbling dialog has been split into tabs: services in one, settings in the other. You’ll find offline scrobbles and a toggle for ‘now playing’ in the settings tab. Elsewhere, issues scrobbling to self-hosted music logging service Maloja have been resolved.
But the goodies don’t end there.
Turntable turns up the bling
Besides scrobbling (not mandatory), Turntable is a configurable desktop media controller. While desktop widgets split opinion, but for those of us who like putting our currently playing track on show, this update has some flashy improvements to try out.
The big change: Turntable is now freely resizable. It already offered various fixed sizes (small, regular and big), but now you can drag from any corner to resize. You can also maximise it without it looking odd, or tile/snap it in your preferred configuration.
You may want to try out different component, size and style combinations to find something that suits you — and when you do you’ll notice a couple of new options.
If you like seeing playback progress, but you don’t like the existing background progress effect (top-right in the header image), a seek bar can be added to the widget.
The progress bar component has two styles: overlay and with a ‘knob’. You can click on the seek bar to, er, seek — depending on media source, as not all support it. The seek bar component can be enabled alongside the existing ‘background progress’ effect.
You can also choose to show shuffle and loop control buttons on the player, which sit either side of the standard previous, play/pause and next buttons. These may not work perfectly with every player, since it relies on what a player supports itself and via MPRIS.
There’s also a new ‘cover blur’ window style which does what it says: it makes the background of the window a blurred version of the currently playing track’s cover art. This mode really comes to life when you resize the window:
Or if you maximise it:
Calculations for window, cover art, and other UI components have been reworked to adapt to the new visual options and window resizing.
In all, another solid update to Turntable that doesn’t skip a beat on form or functionality.
A reminder that Turntable also has a CLI, should you want to use it to scrobble on a headless setup (or on desktop without the GUI). It works with all MPRIS-enabled apps, which is the real appeal: no need to log into your Last.fm (etc) account in five different apps.
- Turntable can scrobble from any MPRIS-enabled player, but to display cover art for tracks in certain players it needs permission to read a player’s image cache folder. ↩︎