Decibel Audio PlayerFrom 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, though it also needs a few Gnome libraries. 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. Why here? Why not on some overlay collection site? Because I want to keep it here, that's why. It's much better for development to keep it with the rest of my stuff. Decibel is not yet in the Portage tree. Hopefully this will change, but for now, it means that you get to pick up the pieces if it breaks. Whatever you do, don't complain to the Gentoo developers if something breaks or doesn't work the way you wanted to. Remember, this is unsupported. That being said, if there's a technical issue that pops up with the decibel-audio-player ebuild, Manifest, etc., email me and I'll take a look. First, download the latest version of decibel-audio-player. Drop it into ${PORTDIR_OVERLAY}/media-sound/decibel-audio-player/. It's marked ~arch, so you'll need to keyword it in /etc/portage/package.keywords before installing.
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:
Once your flags are set, install Decibel:
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. 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 my ebuild to get a better idea of what's also needed. Decibel is new, exciting, and going places, so stay on top of it! Here are a few links to get you started:
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