 Music players on Linux are a dime a dozen. There are a ton of them out there and some of them are really really good Some of them are like why does this thing exist? But really when it comes down to music player what really matters is how well it does its job Does it play music? Well, does it organize music? Well, does it do the things that a music player is supposed to do? And a lot of them try to overcomplicate things by adding in services and all this stuff While those things can be useful and a lot of people like that kind of stuff Sometimes you just need something simple that will play some music and if you're not going to bother with something like VLC or MPV or Something like that. Maybe you want a simplistic music player that just plays music in a GUI and looks really nice Today I'm going to be taking a look at an application that does just that. It's called Ambral. Now Ambral is a GNOME developed Music application and I specifically say GNOME developed because it really does look better on a desktop environment It looks fantastic in both KDE and GNOME obviously. It doesn't look all that great in a window manager I've found that out to my detriment. So what you're going to be seeing today is a Version of the application in elementary OS because I wanted this to application to kind of be shown in its best light Now when I say it's simple, I really mean that it's simple. All it does is play music So let me show you what this thing looks like. This right here is Ambral and as you can see it has a now playing pane along the side and it has a playlist Along the other side and when I say playlist, I mean it's more of a now playing list Not a playlist. You can't actually have playlists in this application Everything that you want to play is going to be right there. So it's more like a cue if that makes sense When you add a folder or a file to Ambral for it to search through it's going to add everything to this list You won't be creating any playlists. You won't be editing any tags. None of that stuff is possible in Ambral and It's that way by design. It's supposed to be Super super simple and that's what it is on the side you have all of the music files that found in the folder that you were able to add and You can add a different folder by just clicking this button here and then going add folder or you can just add one song You can clear the entire playlist by clicking this button here It will match album art, but it only searches through the directory that you've added So it's not going to search the internet as far as I'm aware. I think there's no settings for that as at all Other than that, there's nothing else here. There's no preferences Nothing like that. All it does is play music from a file. That's Specifically what it does and it does know more than that So if you're going to be looking for a music player that does more than that like it has services or you can create playlists or you can edit tags You're gonna find need to find something else because that's not what this does All this does is play music and look pretty so if you move the window around you can see that it is Responsive and this is one of the places where I have a little bit of an issue with this because supposedly you're able to get to the Now playing list from here. I've never been able to figure that out Until right this second apparently there's a button for it I searched through the key bindings here and it says F10 But the F10 button for the now playing list or F9 I guess it was didn't work like if I'm pressing F9 right now It doesn't I guess I actually have to like F9 here Just doesn't work. It just opens up that menu there So me being me I didn't actually click the button So clicking the button actually works. So I don't actually have a problem good news there. It does a good job of Changing its UI based on what song you're playing. So if I change it to a different song Let me just find a different artist here. I'm giving you guys a first-hand look into my music taste here I guess now obviously you're not gonna be able to hear this because I can't put that on YouTube But you can see how the app changed color based on what it was playing So if I change it to another one that has a little bit more of a colorful album art Let's just say it turns out all of my bands use really dull colors when it comes to album art or don't have album art at all Here's one from Tantric. It has a different color for the application. So it matches colors from the album art, which is really nice It makes it look very very pretty now It does have the traditional things that you'd expect in a music player like in terms of playing controls So shuffle and repeat are both here. Those are fairly simple One thing it doesn't do as far as I'm aware is work with gestures I can't test that because I don't have a trackpad on this computer I'm just using a you know trackball, but as far as I know it doesn't use gestures at all Which is a place where they really could improve. So there's really not much more to say that is Ambral It just plays music. It's really really simple and it's one of my favorite music applications right now Actually, it's the one that I keep kind of downloading because when I test a new distribution I really don't need a fancy music organizing application like Clementine or something like that I really don't need something with that much horsepower I just want to play some music and instead of setting up my MPD server and getting NCMPCPP Working up or however the hell you say it, you know I don't really need to do that on every distribution that I test So I just download Ambral which is available as a flat pack and I'm good to go I can just play music from my music folder. I just added my entire music collection to this. It's one big long list It did take probably Three or four minutes to scan the whole directory, but other than that once it was done I was able to play and select whatever it wants. So it's very nice now like I said, it's not going to be for everyone and it may not be for everyone long term because a lot of times You want to play a specific album or you're interested in playing just a particular artist doing that here Is a little bit of pain in the butt because you have to scroll down to that artist and then press play on the top song Whatever and then it will go through those that artist You can't just select that artist and then start playing that not unless you've just added that artist as the playlist if you Have added your entire music collection like I did you have multiple artists there You kind of have to scroll down and find that artist and then play so that is not a Way a lot of people want to listen to their music They want to be able to search through artists and then view it that way Technically you could do that just only add that artist as a playlist and then play it and then you can clear the listing in and add A new artist whatever you want to do that'd be the way you do that here and it's simple enough But it's definitely like I said not for everybody So that is Amber all if you have thoughts on this and you like these little videos where I talk about just a single application You can leave those comments in the comment section below You can follow me on Twitter at the Linux cast you can follow me on massive down or Odyssey Both of those links will be in the video description just below the like button if you like this video hit the thumbs up button It really does help the channel you can support me on patreon at patreon comm slash the next cast Just take all these fine people if you are interested in supporting my patreon You can now get 10% off if you pay for a whole year in advance. 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