Music player

Babe

Music players seem to be the most prolific type of application you can find on Linux. This must say something about the type of people who use Linux and the kind of things they like doing. It definitely says something about no one agreeing on what the perfect music player should look like when so many developers create their own. Babe, or Qt Babe, or Tiny Qt Babe Music Player as it's called on its GitHub page, is one of those tools. Poor names for audio players aren't unique, but the user interface makes this definitely worth a look, especially if you're from the XMMS old-school. This is because Babe's UI is by default uniquely narrow. It fits perfectly along one side of your screen, showing an album cover at the top and a playlist at the bottom. This vertical block is sprinkled with a small selection of icons for launching a playlist, an album view, adding new music, and controlling playback. These controls and the panels they open look more like the equivalent panes in Clementine or Tomahawk (but not Amarok, never Amarok!), but there is a mode that keeps just the album art on top of your screen, which works really well.

The notification system is also excellent with the regular track pop-up showing you an album cover from the currently playing track but with an extra Babe it button. Click on this and you've hearted (or babed?) the currently playing track. These tracks are then added to one of the many dynamic playlists you can create, all of which are displayed in one of the extra panels that can be opened and closed. Babe is currently in early alpha, and the promised YouTube linking, where online music can be integrated with local playlists, was still a little unpredictable during review. But Babe shows real potential, primarily because it's doing something old in a new way.

Project Website

https://github.com/milohr/babe-qt

The music player Babe can be made tiny, 200x200 pixels, showing just the album cover and its excellent notifications.

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