 So, I'm always on the lookout for a new music application and I like to try these things simply because I never stick with a music application for very long because usually when I'm listening to music, I'm listening to it on my phone, which just means I use Deezer, right? I don't have a music player on my phone other than Deezer and that's just where I usually listen to most of my music. But occasionally, I will listen to music on my computer through my headphones and I have never really settled on a great music player for Linux. Now, most of the time I do end up going with NPD and NCMPCPP or whatever the hell you call NCMPCPP, I think is the name of the application. But it's kind of hard to set up and I usually forget, especially when I move between distros and whatever. So I do try to keep an eye on new GUI applications for managing and playing music. And today, we're going to take a look at a one that someone sent me, I apologize, someone sent me this to look at and I don't remember who you are, so I apologize for that. But the application we're going to be looking at today is called FLB Music. Now, it's a bad name. Let's just put that out there. They need to change the name, but the application is kind of okay. So we're going to take a look at that today. Let's go ahead and jump in. So this is FLB Music. Now, first, let's talk about installation. It is available in the vast majority of package formats, except for Flatpak, which really pissed me off because I can install everything via Flatpak and this was available as a Flatpak. So I had to install as an app image and everybody knows exactly what I think of app images. So that was the first knock against it, but I got over it quickly enough. But if you aren't as opposed to app images or snaps, you can download this in most ways. It's also available on Windows and on Mac. So if you wanted to use this on other platforms, you could do so. Now, I'm about 70% sure that this is an electronic application of some kind. It definitely does not follow your GTK theme, but that's okay because it has its own styling. So if we go to the settings, we can actually see there are some themes here by default. This is the theme. It takes on colors from the album art that's playing throughout the entire application, which is pretty cool. You also have other black, which is just up here black mode. The fake black takes some colors from the album art and then the eye killer, block your eyes is just what it sounds like. That's the white theme. Goodness is that not something you'd use. But anyways, I chose the fake black just because I prefer the dark mode. It also allows you to change the accent color. You can change the default tab. You can add other folders to your library. And that's pretty much it when it comes to settings. There's not a lot of settings here. So that's why I kind of started off here because it didn't take very long to talk about the settings. Now, overall, the application is very well designed. It's supposed to have some really nice animations and you can kind of see that when we were there in the settings, it kind of pops up and then pops back down. You can notice those animations throughout a lot of the applications. So if you change the volume down here, you can see that it's kind of animated and stuff like that. And every time you do a hard, it kind of pulses and stuff. So it's actually a very well designed application despite the overall electroniness of the kind of borders. I would much rather it use the system buttons that you'd normally see other than these ones here, which remind me way too much of Windows, but whatever. Outside of the design, the overall feel of the application, actual usage of it is pretty good. Now, I'm going to start off with a negative thing, but this is mostly just because of me. I have all of my music on an external hard drive and it takes a while to spool up. And this application does not like that. It does not like waiting for the hard drive whatsoever. It freezes when it's waiting for the hard drive to spool up. Now I put some music in on my local drive, my internal drive, and I never experienced that. So that's going to be an external hard drive thing and mostly just my problem, but that's really the only negative I had to say about this application in terms of actually using it. That's about all I experienced. Now my music library is a god awful mess. It's so bad. Half of the stuff here doesn't have actual tags to it. Some of it's not the right tags. And it's just it's a mess. And honestly, FLB music doesn't do a very good job of making it better, but you can edit your tags here. So if you go into your folders, you can go into and browse the actual folders that you've added to the application or if you select a track, it'll start playing it obviously. But over here in the sidebar, you can hit this button here and use it as a tag editor. And if you wanted to, you could search through search online for Alba Mart. I haven't actually been successful in having it find one, but we're going to try we're going to try again right now. So we're all wide and search for that. And then just it doesn't seem like it does anything. Now it doesn't maybe that just because it doesn't find anything or maybe that feature doesn't work. I don't know. But the tag editors hit or miss in terms of actually searching for images, but you could always import it and you can change the title artist, all that stuff, and it saves it locally just like it would in any other application. By default, it does show the info pain instead of just the queue. So this is the queue. If you're playing a playlist, it would show up over here. So it does a fairly good job of finding the lyrics if you use the lyric pain. So if you have metadata on your music, it will search for the lyrics and put them up if you want them. And it will auto scroll and all that stuff. So that's really nice. Like with any other music application, you can create playlists and stuff like that. And one of the cool things that I like about it is that you can actually multi select. So if you wanted to, you can select this, you know, this and this and this and this and then you can add to playlist and I'll just add it to a selected playlist and you can add it to the favorites where you can create a new playlist. A lot of music applications for whatever reason don't do a good job of letting you select multiple tracks at once to add to playlist. A lot of them make you do it one at a time, which is really effing annoying. So the fact that you can multi select here is really nice. You can also obviously choose how things are sorted. You can choose between resets and stuff. Now this is just all music library standard stuff. So the place where FLB music kind of differentiates itself is that it has these daily mixes and the kind of streams that it puts together for you based on things that you've added. Now, obviously, the more you use this application, the more useful these tools are going to be for you because it pays attention to what you play and then creates the playlists for you. So I haven't used this very much. So it just basically shows you, shows me the last few that I've tried. But the more you use it, it's going to create these mixes for you that you can then play. They're kind of like customized playlists and it does a somewhat good job of creating playlists based on things that you haven't played before or played in a long time and also other things like power do. I'm not sure what this is supposed to be because a lot of these things aren't about do those at all. So I'm not sure what that's supposed to be, but you kind of get the idea. It shows you some playlists that it puts together. So there are two things that I noticed here. First, the more you use the application, play music, the better the playlists are, you know, it actually does a better job of putting together like songs and stuff like that. But also, if your music library is like mine and doesn't have a ton of metadata attached to it, these things are never going to be as useful as they possibly could be because it relies a lot on yet genre data and stuff like that. If you don't have proper genre data and artists, name and track titles and all this stuff in there, these aren't going to be properly put together. So mine, it's just basically been putting breaking Benjamin up there at the top because breaking Benjamin starts with a B. Now, granted, I haven't used the application for very long. So I don't know how well it will overcome the lack of metadata, but I will just say that the better your music is organized, probably the more useful these playlists are going to be. Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about some bad things. So first of all, I talked about the design. I don't really care much for the outer design. The inner design is fine. I like the animations and I like the way that it brings in some of the accent colors and stuff from the album art and stuff like that. I like that. It's fine. The two things that I noticed, one of them that I talked about was that it freezes when the hard drive is spooling up. That's mostly just me problem. But the other thing is that I've noticed sometimes the application is just downright slow. I'm not sure if it's the hard drive problem just kind of acting up in the background. I'm not sure, but it's definitely not the snappiest application ever. Also, it's not the least resource intensive thing I've ever seen in my life. It takes a fair bit of memory and a fair bit of CPU power to run, and obviously, if you're actually using it to play music, it takes up more. Now, that's not that big of a deal for me because I have tons of resources, but it's definitely not going to be something that you're going to be wanting to use on a very low end laptop. The animations alone probably don't make it the best for older hardware. Just being honest about it just doesn't seem like it's going to be something that's good for lower end hardware. Now, I'm just assuming that. I just want to put that out there based on the statistics that I've seen in H top based on how much RAM and CPU this thing uses and my own experiences with it being pretty slow on my high end hardware. I'm not so sure that it would work very well on low end hardware, but your mileage may vary there. So that is FLB music. There's not a lot of stuff here. I will just say that this is still under development. So there are some things in here that you can't use. So like they have a meld tab here, which doesn't do anything yet. It's coming in the next release. So they're obviously still adding features, which is nice. It's very under development. You can manage your library fairly well through here. I really do like this UI quite a bit other than the title bar, which I wish you should use the native title bar. But other than that, it's really good. I wish also that they changed the name because the name is bad. And also, please developers, a flat pack would be just absolutely wonderful because app images are God awful. They're really bad. So anyways, that is it for this video. If you have thoughts on FLB music, you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the Linuxcast. I truly do appreciate everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing. We allowed you the chance to be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very much for your support. I truly honestly do appreciate you guys. You're just seriously, you guys keep me going. So thank you so much for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.