Babe-Qt
Version: Git Web: http://bit.ly/babe-qt
There are so many music players for Linux that it’s hard to imagine what another could offer. When we first discovered Babe (without ‘Qt’ in the name), it was an early hobby project written in Vala by Camilo Higuita. The developer is a talented artist and graphic designer, who shows off some very good-looking screenshots of customised Linux desktops on his DeviantArt account.
Higuita is also a talented software developer and the initial idea behind Babe was to create a tiny but polished music player that puts your favourite music tracks at your fingertips. He wanted the player to be very simply designed and compact while capable of advanced features, such as music collection lookups and tagging. It turned out that Vala+ GTK3 wasn’t powerful enough to fulfil Higuita’s design aspirations, but neither was the QML language, which is used in KDE Plasma. This prompted Higuita (aka Milohr) to convert his player to pure Qt, hence the name change.
The main screen presents cover art with a thin playing position slider below it. When you hover your mouse over the cover art extra buttons appear, such as playback control, shuffle, adding the currents track to favourites and toggling the player’s view. The toggle button cycles through three modes: minimalist removes window borders (you hold Alt to drag the Babe-Qt window); the second mode adds a playlist area below the cover art and the third expands the music collection on the left. Babe-Qt has a lots of stylish buttons that hide extra player options, it’s best to try each button yourself to find the Babe-Qt settings area (you add your Music directory here), scroll through the album list, manage playlists and favourites and save your music library searches, etc. The application is a work in progress, and the author hopes to add features such as youtube-dl support for audio streaming and a dedicated Chromium extension. You can build Babe-Qt using $ qmake-qt5 && make and don’t forget to install Qt and Taglib headers beforehand.
“Babe-Qt has lots of stylish buttons that hide extra player options.”