Amberol GTK Music App Gains New Features, Reduces Memory Usage

I’m a big fan of Emmanuele Bassi’s Amberol music player and the latest version, released this weekend adds a couple of pretty big new features.

Before I get to those, I will point out that this GTK-based music music player has been updated numerous times since I spotlighted it back in April. UI improvements, including relocating the playlist to the left-hand side of the window, have been implemented; there’s now an option to disable UI recolouring; and comprehensive MPRIS support.

Amberol 0.8 is the latest release and it lets you search for songs in the playlist/queue. You don’t need to click a ‘search’ icon to get at this (though you can) as you can just start typing to start searching. Search also works when the playlist/queue is in selection mode.

Album artwork is shared between songs from the same album to help reduce memory usage; and the window size is remembered and restored between sessions (which was a big want of mine, so yay).

You can also now run Amberol in the background using Flatpak’s sandbox portal. This behaviour isn’t default so go to Settings > Applications > Amberol to enable it (and on my Ubuntu 22.04 install the player still quits on close even when this is enabled, so YMMV).

Get Amberol Music Player

Keep in mind that Amberol is not a regular Linux music player™. It won’t index your music library to make it easier to browse; there are no plugins for services like Last.FM, Wikipedia, or internet radio stations; you can’t save and load playlists; and you can’t edit metadata.

Instead, Amberol is a music player whose emphasis is squarely on playing, be it your entire Music folder or just a specific album or a specific artist within it.

Like the sound of it? You can install Amberol from Flathub on all major Linux distributions. We have a guide on how to install Flatpak on Ubuntu if you need some pointers.