Amberol

Amberol is a music player that does exactly one thing: play audio files. Written in Rust with GTK4 and GStreamer by Emmanuele Bassi — a GTK core developer and gtk-rs contributor — it is a deliberate rejection of the feature-bloated music player. There is no library management, no metadata editing, no lyrics fetching, and no network access. You point it at audio files and it plays them.

One of its most striking design details is that the UI background dynamically recolours itself to complement the album artwork of the currently playing track, giving each listening session a distinct visual identity without any configuration.

Features

• Local file playback — open audio files directly or drag and drop them onto the window; no library scanning required
• Adaptive colour scheme — the UI background and accent colours shift to match the dominant palette of the current album art
• Shuffle and repeat modes — repeat all, repeat one, or shuffle the current queue
• MPRIS integration — responds to media keys and system tray controls (compatible with KDE, GNOME Shell, and any MPRIS-aware desktop)
• Queue view — toggle a sidebar showing the full playback queue; reorder or remove tracks
• Compact and full-size modes — resize the window down to a slim mini-player or expand it for full artwork display
• No collection management — no database, no background indexing, no network calls; opens instantly and stays out of your way

Installation

The recommended installation method on all Linux distributions is Flatpak via Flathub:

flatpak install flathub io.bassi.Amberol

Debian / Ubuntu and Fedora

Amberol is not currently packaged in the official Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora repositories. The Flatpak above works on all three distributions and is the supported installation path.

Nix

nix-env -iA nixpkgs.amberol

Or in a NixOS configuration:

environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.amberol ];

Building from source

Amberol uses the Meson build system. You will need GTK4, libadwaita, GStreamer, and a Rust toolchain installed.

git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/ebassi/amberol.git
cd amberol
meson setup _build --prefix=/usr/local
ninja -C _build
sudo ninja -C _build install

Usage

Opening files

Launch Amberol and use File → Open (or press Ctrl+O) to select one or more audio files. You can also drag and drop files or an entire folder directly onto the window. Amberol accepts all formats supported by GStreamer, including MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, and Opus.

Playback controls

Media keys

If your desktop supports MPRIS (GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma, and most others do), Amberol responds to hardware media keys and any MPRIS controller such as playerctl:

playerctl --player=amberol play-pause
playerctl --player=amberol next

Why Amberol?

Most music players on Linux fall into one of two camps: lean but unmaintained, or feature-complete but heavyweight. Amberol occupies a deliberate third position — actively maintained, visually polished, and intentionally constrained. If you want to queue up a folder of FLACs and listen without configuring anything, Amberol is the tool for the job.

It is not the right choice if you need a library browser, smart playlists, Last.fm scrobbling, or remote streaming. For those use cases, look at Rhythmbox, Lollypop, or Jellyfin.