Kid3, the popular Qt audio tag editor, released version 3.9.2 today. PPA updated for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 18.04.

The new Kid3 3.9.2 is a bug-fix release. Though, there are new features including .dff support, an audio format developed by Sony and Philips for Super Audio CD (SACD).

New features also include support for chapters in MP4 audio books, importing from URLs containing search results from Discogs and MusicBrainz, and a Norwegian translation.

Other changes in the release include:

• Allow playlist file name formats to be edited.
• URLs with search results from web browser can be entered in the import dialogs (Amazon, Discogs, gnudb.org, MusicBrainz).
• New style for macOS icon.
• Cli interface adds encoding detection for text file import and export.
• Set rating as star count with ‘set ratingstars’ (Kid3-cli).
• Build with latest mp4v2 library.
• Fix wrong modifications of frames when importing.

How to Install Kid3 3.9.2 in Ubuntu:

The app has an official PPA contains the packages for all current Ubuntu releases, and their based systems, such as Linux Mint, Pop! OS, Zorin OS.

1. First, search for and open terminal either from system start menu or ‘Activities’ overview. When it opens, run command to add PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ufleisch/kid3

2. Then update package cache by running command:

sudo apt update

3. If an old version of the software package exist in system, you can now open “Software Updater” or “Update Manager” to update the tag editor app.

Or, simply run the command below in terminal to install it:

sudo apt install kid3-qt

You may replace kid3-qt with kid3 in the code for KDE desktop, and/or with kid3-cli for the command-line interface.

Uninstall:

To remove the PPA, either use ‘Software Sources’ or ‘Software & Updates’ utility, or run command in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:ufleisch/kid3

And, remove kid3 tag editor via command:

sudo apt remove --auto-remove kid3 kid3-*

Audacious 4.2 finally goes stable! Here are the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu users.

This release is a bit late, since the beta has been released for 5 months. As you may already known, Audacious 4.2 feature new dark theme, as well as Flat icon in both light and dark. You can enable them via ‘Files -> Settings’ dialog.

Audacious Dark & Flat icons

For Winamp interface in Qt mode, there’s now a Search and Select dialog for searching music in playlist. Which, supports regular expressions syntax for advanced users.

Winamp interface, search in playlist

Other changes in the release include:

• Add partial support for Ogg FLAC streams
• Automatically set the title of an imported playlist based on the filename
• Preselect the filename of an imported playlist when exporting it again
• Add a Jump to Song dialog to the Winamp interface in Qt mode
• Add formatter syntax to allow truncating title strings

Install Audacious 4.2 via PPA:

I’ve updated the unofficial PPA with the package for Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04 and their based systems, such as Linux Mint and Pop! OS.

NOTE if you’re using the Audacious 4.2 beta package via my test PPA, you have to remove it as well as the PPA first.

First, open terminal by either pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard or searching from Activities overview (start menu). When it opens, run the command to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps

Second, update the package cache in Ubuntu 18.04, Linux Mint, though it’s done automatically in Ubuntu 20.04 +

sudo apt update

Finally, either update the music player via Software Updater, or run the command below in terminal to install/update the package:

sudo apt install audacious audacious-plugins

Uninstall Audacious:

To remove the music player package, use command:

sudo apt remove --autoremove audacious audacious-plugins

And remove the Ubuntu PPA via command:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps

Ubuntu’s default Rhythmbox music player got new release updates a few days ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu via PPA.

Rhythmbox released version v3.4.5 last month and v3.4.6 days ago after more than 2 years of development. Compare to previous Rhythmbox 34.4, Soundcloud plugin and mmkeys plugin have been removed since they are no longer work / useful. DAAP plugin now supports libdmapsharing 4 API, but no longer enabled by default.

The new release has rewritten podcast downloader with better resume and retry, uses podcast episode GUIDs to handle episode URL changes, preserves original order of episodes in podcasts even if episodes have the same publication date. And, crossfading player backend now works much better with network streams. There are as well many bug-fixes and translation updates.

Install / Update Rhythmbox in Ubuntu

The latest Rhythmbox package is available to install as Flatpak package, which runs in sandbox.

For those prefer the pre-installed .deb package, here’s how to update it via the unofficial PPA.

1. Add PPA

First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run command to add the PPA. So far, Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 are supported.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/rhythmbox

Type user password (no asterisk feedback) when it asks for sudo authentication and hit Enter to continue.

2. Install / Update Rhythmbox

After adding the PPA repository, search for and launch “Software Updater” from Activities overview. It should show you the updates for the music player. Simply click on “Install” to get them and enjoy!

Or, you may run the single command in terminal to install/update the music player package:

sudo apt install rhythmbox

How to Restore:

If you found any issue for the package installed from PPA, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:

sudo apt install ppa-purge && sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/rhythmbox

The command will install the ppa-purge tool and purge the Ubuntu PPA you just added, which also downgrade all installed packages from that PPA to the stock versions in your Ubuntu system repository.

There are quite a few audio tag editing applications for Linux. Tagger is a new one with modern GTK4 user interface.

Kid3, puddletag, and easytag editors are really good. But for GNOME (the default desktop environment for Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation), Tagger looks more native due to GTK4 and libadwaita.

Tagger light mode

The app provides a simple and easy to use interface that follow system light and dark color scheme. With it, you can:

• Edit metadata and audio tag including Filename, Title, Artist, Album, Year, Track, Album Artist, Genre, and comment.
• Insert album cover art from file.
• Remove tag.
• Convert filenames to tags and tags to filenames with ease
• And download tag data from internet via MusicBrainz.

filename to tag conversion

It support multiple music file types, such as mp3, ogg, flac, wma, and wav. And, it can edit tags and album art of multiple files, even across subfolders, all at once.

Tagger Dark Mode

How to Install this Tag Editor in Ubuntu & Other Linux:

The app provides official binary package through the universal Flatpak, which works on most Linux distributions.

1. For Ubuntu, firstly press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When terminal opens, run the command to install the Flatpak daemon:

sudo apt install flatpak

Type user password for sudo authentication, though there’s no asterisk feedback.

Fedora, Linux Mint, Pop! OS, etc have flatpak support out-of-the-box. Other Linux may follow this setup guide to get it.

2. After setup the daemon, run the single command below will install the app in your Linux:

flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.nickvision.tagger.flatpakref

NOTE: First time installing flatpak app will also install the Gnome run-time libraries which take more MB disk space.

Once installed, press Super (‘Windows’) key on keyboard to get into overview screen. Then search for and open the audio tagger and enjoy!

How to Remove the Audio Tag Editor:

To remove the flatpak package, open a terminal window and run command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data org.nickvision.tagger

Also clear useless run-times if any by running flatpak uninstall --unused command.

There are quite a few music player applications for Linux. Amberol and G4Music are two of them with really good looking UI design.

Amberol:

Amberol is a GTK4 app uses libadwaita library as well as gaussian blurred cover background for the beautiful app window.

The player aims to be as small, unintrusive, and simple as possible. No music collection or playlist management, no metadata editor, no lyrics.

It just play local music, with basic functions like shuffle and repeat, MPRIS integration, drag and drop from file manager and GNOME integration.

G4Music

G4Music is Amberol inspired music player with quite similar user interface.

It’s so far a single developer software project, while Amberol has a small group of contributors. However, it has more features, including search music from large collection, sort by album/artist/title or shuffle. And, it supports samba and any other remote protocols as well as pipewire audio sink.

How to Install Amberol or G4Music in Ubuntu & other Linux:

The players are available to install as universal Flatpak packages, which work in Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and most other Linux systems.

1.) Firstly, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. Then, run the command below to install the flatpak daemon:

sudo apt install flatpak

Other Linux may follow the official setup guide to install the daemon.

2.) To install the Amberol, run the command below in terminal window:

flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/io.bassi.Amberol.flatpakref

Or install G4Music if you like the search function and pipewire audio sink. Both players will install GNOME 42 run-time libraries if not exist.

flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/com.github.neithern.g4music.flatpakref

Once installed, search for and open the music player from Activities overview and enjoy!

How to Uninstall Amberol / G4Music

To remove Amberol, open terminal and run command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data io.bassi.Amberol

And/or remove G4Music by running command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data com.github.neithern.g4music

To clear up useless run-time libraries, you may also run command:

flatpak uninstall --unused

DeaDBeeF music player released new 1.9.0 version a day ago. Here’s what’s new and how to install the application in Ubuntu.

DeaDBeeF is one of my favorite music players, especially for its design mode. Glory to Ukraine! In this release you’ll see two little hearts (in blue and yellow) in the title bar of app window.

The 1.9.0 release added some new features including:

• Long file seeking support for Opus and FFMPEG
• HTTPS support for vfs_curl in portable builds, via libmbedtls
• Design mode for CocoaUI
• New Scope and Spectrum Analyzer visualizations
• Visualization appearance preferences pane
• New album art loader
• Title formatting $year(time) function
• GTK UI for editing a chosen field of multiple selected tracks, in a table interface
• Creating new playlist via clicking the “+” button in the playlist tab strip
• Improved DSP preferences GTK UI
• Improved handling of invalid MP3 files
• Last.fm scrobbler will use HTTPS by default

And, you can now easily get the menu to set dB scale, Linear scale, or Cubic scale by simply right-clicking on volume slider. There are as well various bug fixes, see HERE for more.

How to Install DeaDBeeF 1.9.0 in Ubuntu:

The software project provides official packages for 64-bit modern PC/laptop. For Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint based systems, simply download the “deadbeef-static_1.9.0-1_amd64.deb” from the link page below:

After downloaded the package, open your Downloads folder, right-click blank area and select “Open in Terminal”. Finally, install the package by running the command below in pop-up terminal:

sudo apt install ./deadbeef-static*amd64.deb

It works in all current Ubuntu releases, including Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.10 and Ubuntu 22.04.

Once installed, press Windows (Super) key on keyboard. Then search for and open the player to enjoy your music!

In addition for those prefer Ubuntu PPA, here’s one that built with Qt5 interface and MPRISv2 plugin support.

It should be trustworthy as the maintainer is the guy behind Debian and Ubuntu’s official Tesseract OCR package. However, the package version there at the moment of writing is still the last v1.8.8. And, it’s better to remove “deadbeef-static” first before installing the music player from this PPA.

How to Remove DeaDBeeF:

The package is installed as deadbeef-static. To remove it, open terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. Then run command:

sudo apt remove --autoremove deadbeef-static

That’s all. Enjoy!

This simple tutorial shows how to install the tiny sound recording app “Audio Recorder” in Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

“Audio Recorder” is a little open-source app that can record audio from your system’s sound card, microphone, browsers, webcams and any sound that your PC plays out.

The tool has a built-in timer that automates audio recording on given clock time or after time period, auto stop when the recorded file size exceeds a limit. And, it can be controlled via Rhythmbox, VLC, Audacious and other MPRIS2 compatible players. For Skype users, it can automatically record all your Skype calls without any user interaction.

Sounds can be saved as OGG audio, Flac, MP3, WAV, M4A, and OPUS. And, it has command line options to control app interface as well as recording actions.

Install Audio Recorder in Ubuntu 22.04:

The PPA also contains old version packages for Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, and Ubuntu 20.04

The app has been more than 10 years old! The developer team maintains an official PPA with all Ubuntu releases and their derivatives (e.g., Linux Mint) support. Somehow, it does not available in Ubuntu’s universe repository.

1. Add the PPA

First press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, paste the command below and hit Enter:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:audio-recorder/ppa

Type user password (no asterisk feedback) for sudo authentication and hit enter to continue.

NOTE: For Ubuntu 24.04 and 23.10, the run command below to add this PPA instead.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/audio-recorder

2. Install Audio Recorder package

After adding the PPA and updating the package cache (which is done automatically), just run the apt command below to install the tool:

sudo apt install audio-recorder

Some Ubuntu based systems need to run sudo apt update to manually refresh package cache after adding PPA. While it’s done automatically in Ubuntu.

Once installed, search for and open the tool from ‘Activities’ overview screen and enjoy!

How to Remove Audio Recorder:

To remove the Ubuntu PPA, either launch “Software & Updates” utility and remove the source from Other Software tab, or run the command below in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:audio-recorder/ppa

And to remove the sound recording app, simply use command:

sudo apt remove --autoremove audio-recorder

That’s all. Enjoy!

Audacious audio player announced the first beta for the next major 4.2 release few days ago.

The new release improved the user experience for those running the player in Qt interface, including the dark mode theme and new Flat icon set.

Audacious Dark Qt interface

The Qt dark mode will be default in Windows. For other systems as well as the new icon set, there are toggle options in the settings dialog.

Qt dark theme and Flat icons options in Settings dialog

Other feathers in Audacious 4.2 beta include:

• Partial support for Ogg FLAC streams
• Preselect the filename of an imported playlist when exporting it again
• Automatically set the title of an imported playlist based on the filename
• New ‘Jump to Song‘ dialog for searching from large list of audio files for Winamp interface in Qt mode.
• Add formatter syntax to allow truncating title strings
• And some bug-fixes.

How to Install Audacious 4.2 in Ubuntu:

I’ve upload the new release package into this unofficial Ubuntu PPA when it goes stable!

For testing purpose, user may install this BETA package in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.10, and Ubuntu 22.04 via the testing PPA

To do so, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal and run the commands below one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps

sudo apt update

sudo apt install audacious audacious-plugins

And, uninstall them if you want by purging the PPA via command:

sudo apt install ppa-purge && sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps