pMusic 6

January 2, 2020 - Posted by zigbert. Reading time: 3 minutes

After more than 2 years since last major update, pMusic 6.0.0 is now released. This post covers the major updates since version 5.6. For more general information about pMusic, please check out the wiki page.

Download pmusic-6.0.0 - The pet package is only 128kb, and is extremly small compared to similar players. A small size and few required dependencies has been the pMusic mantra from the very beginning.

Now, let's look at the news...

System

At the architectial level things has been shrinked and simplified.

pMusic will no longer scan your harddrives for audiofiles unless you request so. When playing a song not found in the database, pMusic will give an option to scan your system. Skip this message, and pMusic will act like a dead simple file/stream player. You can still scan your drives and build up the database later (Menu>Music Sources>Files>Setup). I will highly recommend scanning because pMusic are built around the database, with all the benefits that gives.







The alternative frontends for CD, Radio and Podcast are now left out from the main package. Those can be installed from additonal packs found in the menu (Menu>View>Frontends>Get frontends) or at http://wikka.puppylinux.com/pmusicFrontends. CD's are rare these days, and pMusic's main gui has lowered its entry point. Those specialized frontends feels like overkill at the moment, and Puppy already has a crowded application menu.

Features

While under-the-hood changes are important, it's the new features that makes a release interesting for most of us...

Discography

The greatest "invention" in this release is the combination of the artist-database at musicbrainz.org and Youtube. This gives the opportunity to search for any known artist and dig into its discography. Most likely pMusic will play chosen track either from your local collection or from Youtube. This relies on youtube-dl to be installed, and is now a recommended dependency (pMusic will work just fine without youtube-dl). In other words, you can play all music in the world within pMusic. Ok, not all music - but an incredible amount of it.







Remember that pMusic let us download the playing youtube stream with a simple click. Adding it to the pMusic database and avaliable locally at next play. More info about this feature is covered here.









Pitch

pMusic is no karaoke machine, but lyrics has been grabbed from the web in quite some time. With pMusic 6, there is now an option to change the pitch, and sing along, even if you find your voice not as high as Freddie Mercury... If you are interested in how the sound processing works in pMusic, take a look at the article 'pMusic sound processing'.









Podcast

The podcast handling has been heavily improved since pMusic 5.6. The database has been expanded to more than 40000 channels, and every address is verified that it actually exists. A larger collection of data requires better tools for navigation. Therefor, the database now includes info tags about each channel. This makes it easier to filter the search result. Eg. it's now possible to search for podcast (or browse) based on language, host, category, topic...





Trackinfo

Information about music and artists are mostly grabbed from the database at musicbrainz.org. pMusic has relied on the first version of the musicbrainz api which no longer is supported. We had to update to version 2, and with pMusic 6 the transition is complete. The 'Artist' section has been extended with both the complete discography and an artist image. You can dig into the albums and add tracks to the playqueue the same way as in the search field. The images are downloaded from allmusic.com, and has a somewhat low quality. It works ok as thumbs, but it would be great if we found a better source in the future. Please share your knowledge if you know something pMusic could benefit of.

Misc

The index files for radio stations and jamendo music has been updated. Espesially jamendo.com has been spare with updates in the last years, but now we've got nearly 100000 new songs compared to the previous edition from 2015.

For more details see the changelog or the commit history at github.

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