Amberol GTK Music App Gains New Features, Reduces Memory Usage
![amberol-side-panel-hidden amberol recolouring ui option](https://149366088.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/amberol-side-panel-hidden.jpg)
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).
![Screenshot of the Amberol music player and its flatpak setting](https://149366088.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/amberol-background-run.jpg)
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.