Amberol is a free and open source music player for the GNOME desktop, written in Rust with GTK4 and libadwaita, and built on GStreamer. It plays music, and nothing else: there is no library to index, no tags to edit, no lyrics pane and no smart playlists. You drop songs or a folder onto the window and it plays them, in a small window styled like the rest of GNOME.

Features

• Drag-and-drop playback – drop audio files or a whole folder onto the window, or open them from the file manager, and they are queued as a playlist.
• Deliberately no library – nothing is imported, indexed or written to a database, so the app never manages your collection and the playlist lasts for the session.
• Compact now-playing window – cover art, title, artist and album above a seek bar, with a collapsed view for when the player should stay out of the way and an expandable playlist.
• GNOME integration – libadwaita styling with light and dark variants, MPRIS media controls so the desktop media widget and the keyboard media keys drive playback, and a background-portal option to keep playing with the window closed.
• GStreamer decoding – plays the formats the GStreamer plugins on the system can decode, including MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, WAV and AAC, using the same audio stack as the rest of the GNOME desktop.
• Translated – localised through the GNOME translation platform, so the interface follows the system language.

Requirements and installation

Amberol runs on Linux with GTK4, libadwaita and GStreamer. The recommended install is the Flatpak from Flathub (flatpak install flathub io.bassi.Amberol); it is also packaged in Debian and Ubuntu as amberol. The project is developed in the open on GNOME GitLab.