Looking for an application to play and organize classical music in Linux? Here’s one working in process.
It’s Musicus, a free open-source application written in Rust programming language, and uses GTK4 plus LibAdwaita for modern user interface that’s designed for GNOME Desktop.
This is a local-first application. No cloud, no account required. And, it comes with a pre-made sample library, for those who just want to just listen to some classical music right way.
Musicus can import/export, search, and handle metadata for classical music. And, it features an intelligent random playback with three presets, allowing to configure how much do you prefer between recent added and recordings that haven’t been played for long time, and avoid repeating composers/instruments in custom time interval.
The player so far is at very early development stage. It’s moving to add new features, such as creating albums and Windows support. Until v1.0, it’s NOT recommended to use it as your primary music collection.
How to Install Musicus
NOTE: This is NOT general use music player but only for classical music, generally refers to the art music of the Western world.
Musicus offers pre-made Flatpak package that works in most Linux Distributions. Just go to the Github releases page:
Then, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to install:
flatpak install ~/Downloads/de.johrpan.Musicus.flatpak
NOTE for Debian/Ubuntu, run sudo apt install flatpak first to install Flatpak daemon if it’s not available.
Here, I already have the GNOME run-times installed. If not, the command will also download and download the run-time libraries.
After installed the app, either log out and back in if app icon is not visible, or run command to start it from terminal:
flatpak run de.johrpan.Musicus
NOTE: the first time you launch the application will ask to choose library folder, and offers a button to download pre-made sample library. After that, you can optionally disable network access for Musicus by using Flatseal.
Uninstall Musicus
To uninstall this music player and organizer, use command:
flatpak uninstall --delete-data de.johrpan.Musicus
For choice, you may run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove useless runtime libraries.
