Showing posts with label nuvola player. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nuvola player. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Try Nuvola Player 3 Beta (Cloud Music Player With Tight Desktop Integration)
Nuvola Player is a cloud music player supports various services such as Google Play Music, This is My Jam, Rdio, Deezer, Bandcamp, Spotify, Jango, Mixcloud and KEXP Live Stream.
Its purpose is to integrate these music services with the desktop, providing MPRIS v2 support (integration with the Ubuntu Sound Menu, GNOME Shell MediaPlayer extension, Cinnamon Sound applet, etc.), desktop notifications, multimedia keys support, Unity quicklists as well as an optional tray icon.
The app also provides various extra features such as integration with audio scrobbling services like last.fm and libre.fm, proxy support as well as an option to prefer dark theme.
I've been wanting to write an article about Nuvola Player 3 (currently in beta) for quite some time, hoping it would become stable (the stable release was scheduled for December 2014), but unfortunately it was postponed because of low funding.
However, I decided to publish an article about it anyway, since it comes with some important improvements and it will probably take a while until the stable version is released. Furthermore, the Nuvola Player Launchpad PPAs have a note saying that they are obsolete and Nuvola Player 3 should be used instead.
If you want to help speed up its development, you can make a donation or contribute to its development @ GitHub.
Nuvola Player 3 is a complete rewrite from scratch, containing some important under the hood differences compared to Nuvola Player 2.
Nuvola Player 2 uses GTK3 while Adobe Flash (required by most of the cloud music services supported by Nuvola Player) uses GTK2 and the two cannot live in the same process - "the first generation WebKitGtk+ web rendering engine used in Nuvola Player 2 runs plugins in the same process as the rest of the user interface, so GTK+ 2 based Flash plugins cannot be loaded without conflicts with GTK+ 3", notes the Nuvola Player documentation.
Because of this, Nuvola Player 2 required some ugly hacks to get it to support Flash, which had various disadvantages, like only supporting the 32bit Flash plugin, high memory usage, crashes, etc.
With Nuvola Player 3, these hacks are no longer needed because it uses WebKit2Gtk+, which allows running plugins in a separate GTK2 process, without the need to install 32bit Flash on 64bit systems. Furthermore, if Flash crashes, it doesn't crash the whole Nuvola Player 3 app.
Also, Nuvola Player 3 has an updated UI with client-side decorations and AppMenu in GNOME (however, classic window borders are used in desktop environments that don't fully support CSD, such as Unity).
Other new features available in Nuvola Player 3 include:
- the ability to run multiple cloud music services in the same time;
- separate launchers for each service so you can pin it to the Unity Launcher or whatever dock / app launcher you're using;
- added a keyboard shortcuts configuration manager;
- added support for global keyboard shortcuts;
- reworked command line interface (see "nuvolaplayer3ctl --help" for all the available options);
- Unity Quick list integration was enhanced to show state of toggle actions (e.g. thumbs up/down, feature request) and radio actions (e.g. star rating).
Unfortunately, Nuvola Player 3 doesn't yet support some of the services that are available in Nuvola Player 3, such as Hype Machine, Pandora and Logitech Media Server, but they might be added later on, while Amazon Cloud Player, Synology Audio Station and 8tracks are under development and will be added to the repository when ready.
Install Nuvola Player 3 (beta)
To install Nuvola Player 3, you can use its official installer which adds the Nuvola Player repository and installs the latest Nuvola Player 3 (or Ubuntu 14.04, 14.10 and 15.04, Fedora 20 and 21 - unfortunately, the repository wasn't updated for Fedora 22 yet -, as well as Debian Sid and Jessie). For complete installation instructions, see THIS page.
Note for Linux Mint users: While Linux Mint is not officially supported, you can simply select Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in the installer and it should work. Howerver, Linux Mint doesn't install packages listed under "Recommends" and because of this, Flash Player as well as the Nuvola Player 3 services won't be installed and you'll have to install them manually (install "nuvolaplayer3-all-services" to get all the Nuvola Player 3 services and one of the following packages for Flash Player: adobe-flashplugin, flashplugin-installer or freshplayerplugin).
Nuvola Player 2.5 Released With Spotify Web Player And Grooveshark Mobile (HTML5) Support
Nuvola Player 2.5 was released yesterday, bringing support for new services such as Spotify Web Player, Grooveshark Mobile (HTML5) and others, as well as improvements for some already existing services.
For those not familiar with Nuvola Player, this is a cloud music player which integrates various cloud music services such as Google Play Music, Grooveshark, Amazon Cloud Player, Bandcamp, Deezer, Hype Machine, 8tracks, Pandora, Rdio, This is My Jam and Pandora with your desktop.
Using it, you'll get desktop notifications, integration with the Ubuntu Sound Menu as well as GNOME Shell Media Player extension, Unity quicklists, multimedia keys support, lyrics, last.fm and libre.fm scrobbling and more. Most of these features are available as plugins so you can easily enable/disable them.
Changes in Nuvola Player 2.5:
- added Grooveshark Mobile (HTML5), Spotify Web Player (doesn't require a premium account) and Jango integration;
- added support for Amazon Music Prime streaming;
- Grooveshark inactivity pop-up window is now automatically dismissed;
- Fixed MPRIS memory leak and optimized metadata property;
- Last FM: Update now playing only once on state/song change;
- Updated Google Play Music country availability;
- Removed non-functional Service updates functionality. Updates will be included in Nuvola Player bug fix releases;
- Users with Nuvola Patrons membership are not bothered by a donate bar if they log in with their Tiliado account in preferences.
The complete Nuvola Player 2.5 changelog can be found HERE.
In other Nuvola Player related news, its developers are currently working on Nuvola Player 3, which has a new code-base written from scratch. Among others, Nuvola Player 3 was ported to "the second generation of the WebKit2Gtk+ web rendering library that doesn't suffer from Flash plugin compatibility issues".
If you want to try Nuvola Player 3 (currently in alpha), see THIS page.
Install Nuvola Player in Ubuntu via PPA
Ubuntu 14.10, 14.04 and 12.04 / Linux Mint 17.1, 17 and 13 users can install the latest stable Nuvola Player by using its official stable PPA. Add the PPA and install the player using the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nuvola-player-builders/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install nuvolaplayerAccording to the Nuvola Player official installation instructions, running "sudo apt-get upgrade" is required (that's why I added it to the installation instructions above) before installing Nuvola Player or else apt-get may fail to resolve some dependencies and the custom Flash Plugin required by some Nuvola Player services won't be installed and thus, those services will fail to work.
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