Goggles Music Manager - Overview and Installation in Ubuntu Maverick

Goggles Music Manager (or GMM for short) is a music player written using the FOX toolkit, with support for Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, MP4, ASF and Musepack. FOX is a fast toolkit for creating graphical interfaces (another application which I reviewed in the past which uses FOX is Xfe - review here - a file manager for Linux).



Note: If you don't want to read the review you can skip directly to the installation instructions below, which show how to compile and install GMM in the latest Ubuntu release, Maverick Meerkat.

Among the features Goggles comes with are:
- support for AlbumArt - embedded in file or separate image on disk
- tag editing - including support for multiple file editing
- smart sorting
- playlists support - including importing/exporting from/to XSPF, M3U, PLS, CSV
- drag and drop support - KDE and GNOME
- uses xine engine
- configurable user interface, including changing default icons
- Last.fm and Libre.fm support
- Replay gain support

Goggles uses SQLite database for the music collection, and it seems to be very fast when it comes to scanning a music collection, at least compared to most of the other existing players with support for music collection.

Regarding the interface, it's plain and simple:

Goggles Music Manager in Ubuntu 10.10

It also supports a so-called Mini Player, which takes up very little desktop space:


System tray support is included too, and Goggles can be configured to show/hide the tray icon and close the application or just minimize it to tray when the main window close button is clicked.

Drag and drop from Nautilus will also work, and the user will be presented with an importing window for the new files to be added to the playlist.

Goggles successfully fetched all the local album covers, however showing them is disabled by default, so you have to set it in Preferences and restart the application.

The playlist can be sorted using various criteria, and the columns can be shown/hidden and rearranged in a different order.

The Preferences window allows to configure the Last.fm and Libre.fm accounts, although when switching from one another in the drop down list the account username and password seem to be lost so you will have to enter them again. Here you can also customise the tray icon, control buttons location (top or bottom), appearance and audio driver to use.


Installation in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

Follow these steps:

1. Download the source
Get the source code from the official Google Code page, here (direct link here). At the time of writing the version is 0.11.5, for which this tutorial was made.

2. Uncompress the package
Open up the Terminal and make sure the current working directory is the one where you saved the archive (use pwd and cd to view the current directory and to navigate to your downloads directory e.g. cd; cd Downloads) and uncompress the source tarball using the following command:

tar -xjf gogglesmm-0.11.5.tar.bz2

3. Install the needed dependencies
Type the following two commands:

sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install libfox-1.6-dev libsqlite3-dev libghc6-curl-dev libtag1-dev libxine-dev libdbus-1-dev

The first command will install the tools needed to compile the application, while the second fetches and installs the development packages of various libraries needed by GMM.

4. Install GMM
Type the following commands:

./configure
make
sudo make install

This should be all. To run Goggles, just type gogglesmm in a terminal or press Alt+F2 and type gogglesmm in the run box that appears.

Alternate installation prefix
Alternately, you can specify an installation prefix and install as normal user:

./configure --prefix=/home/USER/usr
make
make install

In which case you will need to include /home/USER/usr (or the prefix of your choice and replacing USER with your username) in your $PATH, by editing the file ~/.bashrc and adding a line like this:

export PATH=/home/USER/usr:$PATH

Then issue:

. ~/.bashrc