Cantata, a Qt-based music player for MPD (Music Player Daemon), has reached version 1.3.0 just yesterday, and a fix for compiling it in KDE, 1.3.0.1, was put out a few moments ago. This release comes with 87 fixes and improvements. Some major changes and new features include:
- add option to control start-up state: visible, hidden or remembered from previous run
- undo/redo support for play queue
- many interface fixes and improvements
- add remove duplicates functionality to playlists and play queue
- read lyrics from the LYRICS tag in FLAC, Vorbis, Opus and Speex files
Image source: Image credit
Overall, Cantata suffered major overhauls on all levels. The interface has suffered lots of fixes and improvements; communication with MPD was improved too; playlist and play queue handling also suffered fixes.
Image source: Image credit
Installing from the PPA
Open the terminal and type the following commands to install Cantata from the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/cantata sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install cantata
Installing from Source
Make seems to give the following error on Ubuntu 13.10 with Cantata 1.3.0 (this was fixed in Cantata 1.3.0.1):
lconvert: could not exec '/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/qt4/bin/lconvert': No such file or directory make[2]: *** [translations] Error 1 make[1]: *** [po/CMakeFiles/translations.dir/all] Error 2 make: *** [all] Error 2
However, the binary is successfully built, available in the build directory and you can run Cantata as ./cantata.
Cantata 1.3.0.1 was released few moments ago with a fix for compiling it. Follow the next steps:
Download the source tarball from here and uncompress it:
tar -xjf cantata-1.3.0.1.tar.bz2
Next, install the dependencies:
You will need the source repositories enabled for this to work.
Finally, change the working directory to cantata-1.3.0.1 and type the commands:
mkdir build && cd build cmake .. make sudo make install
To install as normal user in a different prefix, use this:
mkdir build && cd build cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/usr make make install
Cantata offers a wealth of options, as well as Internet services like Jamendo and support for podcasts:
So if it suffered fixes, is it improved or still to heal from the fix?
It definitely suffers more than one button and scrollwheel, but then there’s no room or UX for notes over by the web service icons, and the options seem to have some handwaving above them, and most pretense of color and fancy has been scrubbed. Do we need secondary daemons to fix the clients?