Introduction

We have decided to take a stab at one of our favorite music players/libraries, gmusicbrowser, and make the user interface more accessible and beautiful. In addition to our new layout, we want to provide gmusicbrowser in our PPA also because gmusicbrowser hasn’t seen a stable release in quite a while, even though the development branch is quite stable. So to bring you all the new features we’re bringing you the packages directly from Git.

To achieve our goals we modified gmusicbrowser’s surface (mainly through the customizable layout-system, but also small changes to core) and created a new icon-theme (heavily inspired by DanRabbit’s elementary theme): both the shimmer layout and the elementary-icon theme are used by default in our PPA.

We’re also working on a replacement of gmusicbrowser’s logo, as the current one (the camel with the headphones) doesn’t scale well and there is on svg-source of the original, so no (easy) way to create high-resolution icons.

To give you some taste of where we stand, here’s a few of the core features of our layout.

Features (in progress)

Below you can see our songtree-view. you can easily access the three different view-modes (list, tree, mosaic) with the widgets on the top right next to the search-field.

The songtree-view groups albums and as a subgrouping also multiple discs. We figured this is a sensible way of accessing your albums.

Next up is the simple list-view. you can easily add and re/move columns here to quickly access the information you want. sometimes this can be nicer than having the album grouping (e.g. when preparing a playlist).

The third view-mode is the so-called mosaic-view. If you’re a fan of cover-artwork (like us) you’ll love this. You get an overview of all your albums in a glimpse and if you know what the cover looks like it’ll be easy to spot what you’re looking for here – apart from that it simply looks gorgeous!

One more thing we’d like to show you is the breadcrumb-like system we use for displaying song-data. Not only does it provide a logical structure (trackname « album « artist), but it is also click-sensitive to provide you with quick access to either albums from an artist or tracks from an album.

There’s definitely more development to come! If you feel like filing bugs, do it against the gmb-shimmer project in Launchpad.