Beatbox music player has been updated and made available for Ubuntu 12.04.

The former-elementary application, which hits version 0.4 with this release, gains stability, performance and bug fixes in addition to a number of significant new features.

Basics

As any music app should be Beatbox is simple to get started with, even prompting you on first run to import some music – a super intuitive gesture that will save you staring at a blank screen, or cause you to root through menus.

The importing my library was slow, and at times I thought the app had frozen, but in around the same time that it takes to boil an overly-full kettle twice my 15,000 track library was ready and waiting to be played.

Looks

One thing that is clear from the get-go is that the application has been designed solely to complement the elementary GTK theme.

For example, there are parts where colour of text used by the app drowns in Ubuntu’s orange highlights; there are no icons on either of the ‘view’ buttons, and the monochromatic symbols for menu unfolding, shuffle, repeat, etc are simplistic but not consistent in style with the rest of the system icon theme.

But if you can overlook the (likely temporary) cosmetic inconsistencies you’ll find some cracking features on offer…

Features

The search needs to be singled out as the standout feature in Beatbox. It suggests artists and albums as you type giving you a super quick way to play what you want with a minimum of fuss.

A sole click on an album cover in the ‘Album View’ presents you with a pop-over track-list from which to choose tracks to play, add to play-lists etc.

I’ll be blunt: I don’t like the single-click approach. It breaks the expectation the rest of my desktop gives me (double-click to open something). Hopefully an option to set this as a double-click will appear in later versions.

Other features include: –

Sound Menu support

Two Views – Album art and ‘list’

CD Playback

iPod Syncing

Auto-fetching of missing album art

Album art renderer in ‘List View’

Scrobble support

Equaliser

Install Beatbox on Ubuntu 12.04

Like a lot of apps at the moment Beatbox is not yet available to install through the Ubuntu Software Center, but it can be installed by adding the official PPA – Personal Package Archive – to your systems’ Software Sources.

This can be done quickest by using the Terminal application and running the following commands: –

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sgringwe/beatbox

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install beatbox

Once Beatbox has fully installed you can launch it using the Dash.