Cantata has discontinued. If you’re looking for another app for Music Player Daemon, then Ymuse is a good choice for GNOME, Xfce or other GTK based desktops.

Ymuse is a free open-source GTK front-end for Music Player Daemon, written in Go programming language. It can be used as either a player for local music playback or a client to control remote MPD, while using few resource.

As a GTK app, it looks modern in Ubuntu, Fedora, and other Linux with GNOME. It has light / dark mode that follow system color scheme. Besides the basic job that MPD client does, it also has HTTP streaming support.

Compare to Cantata, Ymuse has less features and does not load cover art embedded in audio file .

How to Install Ymuse in Ubuntu:

It’s easy to install the app via the universal Snap package. Simply search for and get it from Ubuntu Software:

Don’t like Snap? The native .deb package as well as .rpm package for Fedora based systems are available to download in Github page:

And, if you want to use Ymuse for local music playback, also install mpd by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal and running command:

sudo apt install mpd

The default settings are usually OK. But, you may edit the ‘/etc/mpd.conf‘ (run sudo gedit /etc/mpd.conf to edit the file) as need. See the documentation for more. Also, change the Ymuse preferences accordingly.

How to Remove Ymuse:

To remove the snap package, use Ubuntu Software or run command in terminal:

sudo snap remove ymuse

To remove the deb package, run command:

sudo apt remove --autoremove ymuse