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In the past I reviewed Minirok, which is a minimalist music player for KDE with a simple interface. Well, Decibel surely is its counterpart in GNOME. The version I'm going to talk about is 1.00 running in Ubuntu 9.04 with GNOME 2.26.
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In the past I reviewed Minirok, which is a minimalist music player for KDE with a simple interface. Well, Decibel surely is its counterpart in GNOME. The version I'm going to talk about is 1.00 running in Ubuntu 9.04 with GNOME 2.26.
Decibel 1.00 in Ubuntu 9.04
The first thing I noticed was that the file explorer can be a little confusing because I couldn't make the file explorer display nothing more but my home folder, so access to my mounted volumes in /mnt (where I have the music) was not possible. Showing hidden files didn't help either, since .. was not displayed. So here's what I did. I edited the configuration file in ~/.config/decibel-audio-player and replaced the home location (/home/embryo/ with / for root):
S'Home'
p14
S'/home/embryo'
S'Home'
p14
S'/'
Later I saw the file explorer root directory can be configured from the Edit -> Preferences menu, File Explorer tab. I think this should be probably be more visible for first-time users.
This way upon starting Decibel again, the root file system was shown. I noticed dragging and dropping only works for directories which have audio files inside them, but not for directories with other sub-directories which can (possibly) include tracks too. Here's how Decibel looks like:
As I already said, the interface is very simplistic. Decibel features a menu bar, a tree view for directories on the left and the playlist occupying the rest of the space.
The playlist can be sorted by track number, title, artist, album, length, genre, date and path, and all these columns can be shown or hidden. You can save the playlist to a .pls file. You can also shuffle or repeat the playlist.
The preferences window includes several nice features, like:
- Audio CD, to play audio CDs with Decibel
- AudioScrobbler, to submit songs to Last.fm
- Covers, to show album covers (this include covers from the album's directory or from the Internet; names for local covers can be changed)
- File Explorer, allowing to add directories for fast access
- Instant Messenger status, to update Pidgin's status with the track playing in Decibel
- Status Icon, to put Decibel in the system tray
Those are quite a few features I would say, however I couldn't find a way to actually configure the Last.fm song submission.
Decibel has several nice features, including cover art, system tray integration or IM status
If you're looking for whistles and bells, Decibel is definitely not for you. If you're looking for a minimalist, fast and clean audio player, stripped by advanced features, then Decibel should probably be one of the first alternatives to try. Just keep in mind that it's not intended to be an advanced audio player, so it doesn't mean it's 'worse' than other audio players, it's just designed for users who want only to play music and forget other, more advanced features. Full Story |
