Decibel Audio Player

1.  Introduction

What's Decibel?

From the homepage: Decibel Audio Player is a GTK+ open-source (GPL license) audio player designed for GNU/Linux, which aims at being very straightforward to use by means of a very clean and user friendly interface. It is especially targeted at Gnome and will follow as closely as possible the Gnome HIG.

Decibel is a nifty, simple little app. It has as much playback functionality as you want it to have. It's not an audio Swiss Army knife; for that, take a look at Banshee, Exaile, or Amarok. It's intended for easy browsing and playing of your music collection. It supports several audio formats and CD playback, and can keep track of several different music library locations. (A nice improvement over other audio applications that track only one library).

Decibel mostly uses Python, gtk+, and gstreamer. It also needs a few Gnome libraries to handle the Gnome keyring for Last.fm integration. It should still be lightweight even if you don't use Gnome. If you do use Gnome, it will be fully integrated into your desktop.

Decibel has optional additional runtime integration with various Gnome libraries such as gnomeprint, gtksourceview, wnck, gnome-applets, gnome-media, totem-pl-parser, and a few others. More on this later.

2.  Gimme!

For Gentoo users

Sync your Portage tree to make sure you'll be getting the latest Decibel version. It's currently marked ~arch, so you'll need to keyword it in /etc/portage/package.keywords before installing.

# echo "media-sound/decibel-audio-player" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
# echo "media-plugins/gst-plugins-meta" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

Next, let's take a look at the available USE flags. Since Decibel uses the modular gstreamer framework, you can choose the kinds of audio formats you want to be able to play. Decibel currently supports WMA (via ffmpeg), mp4 (aac), mp3, FLAC, Musepack, and Ogg Vorbis.

Here are the USE flags available for the Decibel ebuild:

Decibel's ebuild depends on gst-plugins-meta, a metapackage that provides most of the audio codecs. You can add support for the desired codec by activating the appropriate USE flag for gst-plugins-meta:

You can set your desired USE flags globally in /etc/make.conf, or locally in /etc/portage/package.use. For example, to enable support for everything but Musepack, you could do the following:

# echo "media-plugins/gst-plugins-meta ffmpeg flac mad vorbis" >> /etc/portage/package.use
# echo "media-sound/decibel-audio-player -musepack aac cdaudio gnome libnotify" >> /etc/portage/package.use"

Once your flags are set, install Decibel:

# emerge -avt decibel-audio-player

One thing Decibel doesn't do is edit tags. Its creators believe such functionality is best provided by dedicated tag editing applications. Remember, Decibel focuses on being a real audio player focused on playback. There are plenty of other tagging apps available, such as TagTool.

For everyone else

If you're not running Gentoo, it's possible your distribution already provides packages. Debian and Ubuntu have have .debs available.

Otherwise, you can compile Decibel from source by following the instructions. Be sure to note the dependencies. However, you should also take a look at the ebuild to get a better idea of what's also needed.

3.  Resources

Decibel is new, exciting, and going places, so stay on top of it! Here are a few links to get you started:

• The Decibel Audio Player homepage. Screenshots, instructions, downloads, and more.
• Decibel's bug tracker. If you find bugs in the program itself, report them here. The bug tracker is also the best way to make feature requests and stay on top of development.
• Screenshots and ebuilds from before Decibel was added to the tree.

The contents of this document are licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution / Share Alike license.