I’ve used many audio players in the past (including extremely simple ones), but haven’t really used something like the “Nulloy” player. It is another simple music player that uses the Gstreamer multimedia framework for audio playback.
It’s an open-source audio player, the UI is written in Qt and supports GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. But as said before, one of the things that makes it unique is the progress bar style that it uses (which also adds a beautiful look to it).
As you can see from the below screenshot, whenever you play an audio file, it creates a waveform based on the actual audio data (unique for each audio track, of course) and that’s your progress bar! (perhaps you geeks have used similar ones before, but this is totally new to me ;-)).
Few main features …
*. It should be able to play all the audio formats supported by Gstreamer (such as MP3, AAC, OGG Vorbis, WMA, FLAC, WAV etc).
*. Create and save playlists.
*. Drag-n-Drop support.
*. The developers say that it uses somewhat little of your system resources and this seems to be true as it used about 15-18MB of RAM while I was using it.
*. Two built in skins (the default one or the other one that inherit the UI look-n-feel from your OS).
*. Change keyboard shortcuts.
*. Unity application launcher integration (plus Windows 7 task bar support).
*. Restarting playback from the last location (can be disabled).
*. You can change few other options such as enable the system tray support, automatic update checking, restore playback after restart, change the skins and few more options from its “Preferences” window.
If Interested, you can install Nulloy in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot by using the below commands.
wget -q http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/sergey-vlasov:/Nulloy/xUbuntu_11.10/Release.key -O- | sudo apt-key add –
sudo add-apt-repository ‘deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/sergey-vlasov:/Nulloy/xUbuntu_11.10/ / #Nulloy’
sudo add-apt-repository -r ‘deb-src http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/sergey-vlasov:/Nulloy/xUbuntu_11.10/ /’ # for Ubuntu 10.10 and beyond
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nulloy nulloy-gstreamer
It also support other versions of Ubuntu such as 11.04 Natty Narwhal, 10.10 and 10.04 (plus Fedora). For installation instructions for those versions & downloading Windows and Mac OS X binaries, please visit this official Nulloy download page for more.
Remember, it’s still at its Alpha stage so you might encounter bugs. But however, it worked really well while I was using it in Ubuntu 11.10 (except, sometimes I couldn’t access its right click menu while using the “native” skin, but it worked while using the default).
And also remember that, it needs a decent amount of your CPU cycles to generate those “Waveforms” and there is no option to disable it. So if you have somewhat older hardware, then it might get slow while creating the Waveforms. Other than that, thumbs up for ‘Nulloy’!.
3 Comments
Very nice ,just what i looking for.I play songs with my guitar and he help me a lot to see the waveform (on progress) .Very light ,very simple GOOD!!!
Yes, it is unique in its own way :).
Are you guys spending any real time with Nulloy? Waveform images are nice but not really a deal-maker or breaker when selecting a music player. If testers give this plain-looking music player more than a 10 minute peek, they’ll find out what is REALLY revolutionary about it. For the FIRST TIME in digital history the maddening problems hat surround the consistent & accurate display of Cover Art while music is playing, has been forever banished! It took tiny Nulloy’s original and uniquely simple equation to finally solve the complex problem that big teams behind VLC, Winamp, Windows Media Player and all the other players listed in every ‘software experts’ annual Top 10 or 20 picks.. The solution? The Nulloy music player simply displays the digital image (.jpg or ,png) of an ‘album cover’ that you already have in each album folder – or can get very easily by using other great freeware such as Album Art Downloader, ‘Cover Fetch’, etc. In one hour of Internet time (cable) I can find and download 35 to 40 album covers and I only have to do it once. I get to choose the best image from a bunch and am not stuck with one of awful quality or completely wrong – often the result of other players that auto-select from the one or two image databases that most cover-displaying music players choose from.
Another great thing about Nulloy is that it plays music formatted in the best ‘lossless’ compression codecs, and though I am partial to the .flac, .tta and .ape codecs, Nulloy plays many others as well as some of the popular but less desirable ‘lossy’ codecs. Finally, although Nulloy is in its infancy, it has already solved the most vexing problem faced by the other software music players. The rest should be easy if they avoid the path to a ”million bells & whistles”. Hello Nulloy,?… can I have a nice 12-band Frequency Equalizer next?
Mars Bonfire, Canada