Decibel – an all-you-need-player

For those following my posts, I have a pretty bare install at the moment, ( Debian Lenny using LXDE+Openbox). So, in my search for a simple and intuitive mp3 player, I came across Decibel (see homepage). It is a lightweight audio-player, with a simplistic layout; a file-browser were you can change the root, and a simple player with added mp3’s.

Also, the plugin-section is growing. Missing the option of closing to system-tray, though.

Stiill, it fits my needs – it will be fun to see how long I will stick with it. For about 6 months now, I have been using mpg123 from command-line – which is actually quite simple and elegant. Mainly because I did not bother to search for a friendly, simplistic gui-audio player like Decibel. But mpg123 works like a charm:

$ mpg123 -Cv files

Exaile also caught my eyes – and I was pretty nice. Also Listen was my main player for a while, but lost interest due to some idiotic bugs (which I no longer can remember) and the fact that the homepage has not been updated for months (years!)…

Back to the topic – Decibel’s got potensial. The most useful plugin I have seen: write current playing song to a text-file. This means I can use Conky to display my current playing song I did this by adding

${execi 5 cat ~/.config/decibel-audio-player/now-playing.txt}

I used execi 5 to set 5 seconds delay between the executions (I update Conky every second). The plugin lets you define what it should output to the file. Of course, the standard-plugin-system-tray-notification does this for you.