For many years, Linux users have had a wide choice of music players to listen to their favorite music. Many of them compete to give users as many options as possible.
Amberol, the next rising star in this niche, is the polar opposite of this. It was built using GTK4 and Rust programming language. Named after Thomas Edison’s Blue Amberol Records, it is the ultimate simple Linux music player, with a great look and a single goal – to play music.
Amberol Music Player Feauters
Amberol, as previously stated, was developed to play your locally stored music files. It cannot manage your music collections or playlists and does not show you lyrics. It even does not allow you to change the metadata of your music files.
However, it excels at what it was designed to do: play music files. Amberol has a sleek and polished look that will appeal to all aesthetic enthusiasts.
Additionally, its tight integration with GNOME perfectly fits the desktop environment’s overall feel, making it seem like an integral part of it.
Amberol Music Player’s adaptive user interface is one of its most notable features. When you expand the application horizontally, the default view you receive when you launch it smoothly reveals your current playlist.
On top of that, the app’s chameleon-like UI color adapts to the currently playing song based on the cover colors.
Finally, we would like to point out one interesting thing if you decide to use Amberol. Closing the app from the “Close” button won’t stop the music playing as many might expect.
As the player is tightly integrated with GNOME Desktop Environment, it remains active and available for quick access via the GNOME Notification Center, from where it’s just a click away.
In conclusion, we can say that if you are looking for a simple music player for your GNOME desktop that looks great at the same time, then Amberol is the way to go. For more information, you can visit the GitLab project page.
Installing Amberol Music Player on Linux
Amberol is a relatively new piece of software; hence it is not currently available in the repository of virtually any Linux distribution. But, of course, there are exceptions, such as Arch Linux, where it is already available for installation from the AUR repository.
Fortunately, the software is available for installation as a Flatpak package. But if you’re unfamiliar with Flatpak, our excellent guide on the subject, “Flatpak on Linux: What It Is and How to Install Apps with It,” will come in handy.
Things are a lot simpler here. First, run the following command in the terminal to enable the Flathub remote if it is not already enabled:
sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepoCode language: JavaScript (javascript)Then, run the following command to install Amberol Music Player on your Linux system:
flatpak install flathub io.bassi.AmberolCode language: CSS (css)Finally, you can run it directly from the application launcher you’re using or from the terminal by typing:
flatpak run io.bassi.AmberolCode language: CSS (css)
