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 yet—it’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.
I've just tested this on a folder/album, to see if it would update metadata to the actual folder/file, like Banshee can, like iTunes could do 20 years ago.
It does not, just like most other players with similar claims, its 'metadata update' relates only to itself.
It does not create/rewrite/update folder/file names, therefore it does not truly update metadata.
So fooyin is just another shiny face without any underlying substance.
This is why I still have a machine running Ubuntu 16.04, because no-one, NO-ONE, has come up with anything close to Banshee, since the developer abandoned it as a result of vicious personal attacks by 'open source enthusiasts' because it used Mono which is open source.
Main dev here.
When changing metadata in the properties dialog, changes to fooyin's internal database are only made if the files are written to successfully. If you're not seeing any changes in your files, then that's a bug that needs to be investigated.
When you say "create/rewrite/update folder/file names", what do you mean exactly? Those are unrelated to the tags/metadata of a file.
Hi Luke.
What I mean is that in Banshee I could take a file (e.g. xyz.flac) and edit its properties, with the result being that a new ~/folder/artist/album/file.flac would be created, that would show on my desktop file manager, and that entire data chain would also show on a((n) external) portable/personal music player.
I have seen claims (not by you) that fooyin can do this, but it cannot, no more than RhythmBox or Clementine can. I'd probably have to use Audacity to achieve this, but that is so time consuming. Maybe it can be done in Quod Libet/Ex Falso, but again, very time consuming.
What I'm describing is not a bug. It's a lack of functionality. I do not see the advantage that fooyin has over any other desktop media player. The metadata changes done in fooyin only show in fooyin. At the raw folder/file level nothing has changed.
The internal database is exactly that which it is. It is not portable.
I am not dismissing fooyin, I'm saying that it doesn't really do much more than any other desktop media player. Most of them are good for creating their own metadata functions, playlists, etc., that work only for themselves. And if that is the purpose of fooyin then it's just as good as any of the others.
What surprises me is that since Banshee was tragically abandoned, no-one has created anything with the equivalent functionality.
Ah, I think I see what you mean now.
When I say metadata, I mean the tags like title, album, artist etc stored within the header of the files themselves. Most music players read that information. fooyin's internal database is kept in sync with that data, and it's how most tag editors work.
What you're talking about is adjusting the directory structure of the files to reflect metadata updates. That is possible in fooyin manually using the file operations context menu option, though I will look into the possibility of automatic moving of files.
Where is the 'file operations context menu option'? I couldn't find that.
What I did was copy a file to a 'WIP' (Work-in-Progress) folder, then edit the metadata to see if the directory structure had changed; i.e. from ~/WIP/xyz.flac to ~/WIP/xyz-artist/xyz-album/xyz.flac.
It hadn't changed.
AFAIK, no current (Linux) media player/editor exists that has the facility to automatically 'clone' files to a new directory/output folder, with all the metadata and file structure updated, without overwriting the original metadata and file structure.
If you can get fooyin to do this, then it it would probably be the best all-rounder.
What is the language basis of FooScript?