Linux users have plenty of music players to choose from, but a new one caught our eye: Fooyin. It’s completely normal if you haven’t heard of it yetโit’s a brand-new project less than a year old. Let me give you a quick introduction.
Fooyin is a music player currently available only for Linux, focused on customization and extensibility. It supports various audio formats and allows users to manage their local music collection through widgets and an advanced plugin system.
Moreover, Fooyin includes features like custom layouts, playlist management, and tag editing. Users can script and personalize the interface with FooScript, making it highly customizable. Now, back to the topic.
Fooyin 0.8: A Powerful Update for Music Lovers
The new version brings a host of new features and improvements that music enthusiasts will surely appreciate. One of the key additions in Fooyin 0.8 is the extended ReplayGain support, which now includes the ability to calculate ReplayGain information.
This feature helps ensure consistent playback volume across your music collection. If available, the implementation uses libebur128 or FFmpeg as a fallback.
Fooyin has also enhanced FooScript, its scripting engine, by adding a new query syntax that enables advanced filtering and searching. This is a foundation for future smart playlist features planned for upcoming releases.
Additionally, the new release brings exciting visual elements, with peak and VU meter visualizations now available, adding an extra layer of interaction to the music-listening experience.
Regarding improvements, the playback engine has received several notable updates. It now supports DSD playback, making Fooyin compatible with high-quality audio files. The conversion to 64-bit float occurs only when necessary, streamlining the audio processing pipeline.
Of course, the interface has also been polished: mnemonics have been added to all menubar actions to facilitate keyboard navigation, volume tooltip positioning has been refined for accuracy, and filesystem queries have been reduced for tracks without artwork, leading to better performance.
Fooyin’s scripting features have also been bolstered with new commands like $split, which allows users to split fields using a delimiter, and $elide_mid, $elide_end, which are useful for text manipulation.
The search functionality has seen several tweaks, including adding different search modes to unconnected search widgets and a new settings page under Library for better configuration. The previous minimum character limit has been removed, and a helpful message is now displayed when a search returns no results.
In addition, LibraryTree has gained the ability to display artwork, and various state settings are now saved to XDG_STATE_HOME, contributing to a more personalized user experience.
On the bug fixes side, the engine has been stabilized to resolve rare crashes when resuming playback, and gapless playback reliability has been improved. The playlist functionality has also received attention, with fixes for issues like stopping after the current track and restoring the state under rare conditions.
Lastly, the scripting and search modules have had their own fixes, including resolving crashes related to track dragging and incorrect track counts. ReplayGain editing has also been made more reliable, and issues with the $iflonger function have been addressed.
Refer to the changelog for a list of all changes in the new Fooyin 0.8 music player. It is available for installation as DEB and RPM packages. Arch users and Arch-based distributions can find the latest version in AUR.
