Project:Sound/Decibel Audio Player Mini-installation Guide

What's Decibel?
From the homepage: Decibel Audio Player is a GTK+ open-source (GPL license) audio player designed for GNU/Linux, which aims at being very straightforward to use by means of a very clean and user friendly interface. It is especially targeted at Gnome and will follow as closely as possible the Gnome HIG.

Decibel is a nifty, simple little app. It has as much playback functionality as you want it to have. It's not an audio Swiss Army knife; for that, take a look at Banshee, Exaile, or Amarok. It's intended for easy browsing and playing of your music collection. It supports several audio formats and CD playback, and can keep track of several different music library locations. (A nice improvement over other audio applications that track only one library).

Decibel mostly uses Python, gtk+, and gstreamer. It also needs a few Gnome libraries to handle the Gnome keyring for Last.fm integration. It should still be lightweight even if you don't use Gnome. If you do use Gnome, it will be fully integrated into your desktop.

Decibel has optional additional runtime integration with various Gnome libraries such as gnome-applets, gnome-media, and a few others. More on this later.

Installation
First, let's take a look at the available USE flags. Since Decibel uses the modular gstreamer framework, you can choose the kinds of audio formats you want to be able to play. Decibel currently supports WMA (via ffmpeg), mp4 (aac), mp3, mp2, ac3, APE, FLAC, Musepack, WavPack, and Ogg Vorbis.

Here are the USE flags available for the Decibel ebuild:

Decibel's ebuild depends on, a metapackage that provides most of the audio codecs. You can add support for the desired codec by activating the appropriate USE flag for :

You can set your desired USE flags globally in, or locally in. For example, to enable support for everything but Musepack, you could do the following:

Setting USE flags in package.use

Once your flags are set, install Decibel:

Installing Decibel

One thing Decibel doesn't do is edit tags. Its creators believe such functionality is best provided by dedicated tag editing applications. Remember, Decibel focuses on being a real audio player focused on playback. There are plenty of other tagging apps available, such as TagTool.

Decibel has a couple of commandline switches you may want to use. removes the shiny effect overlayed on album covers, which can make them hard to see. The  switch uses the playbin2 GStreamer component to play files. This adds support for ReplayGain and gapless playback. You can view the other commandline switches by running.

Resources
Decibel is new, exciting, and going places, so stay on top of it! Here are a few links to get you started:


 * The Decibel Audio Player homepage. Screenshots, instructions, downloads, and more.
 * Decibel's bug tracker. If you find bugs in the program itself, report them here. The bug tracker is also the best way to make feature requests and stay on top of development.