Recommended Posts

I should preface this post by stating that my favorite music player has been Rhythmbox for quite some time. I have tried others - such as Amarok, Clementine, and Banshee - for various lengths of time, but they have all felt slow and/or unpolished compared to Rhythmbox. I'm not an audiophile; I don't need lots of features in my music player. I want it to do one thing and do it well: play music. While I still use Rhythmbox 2.97 with the Tray Icon extension as my main music player in Debian Wheezy, I recently decided to try Rhythmbox 2.99 in Debian Jessie. While it still works reasonably well, I don't like a lot of the changes the GNOME Project has been making to Rhythmbox since GNOME 3 (Rhythmbox 2.90).
 
This situation with Rhythmbox has prompted me to start trying other music players again. With that quest in mind I stumbled upon a contender which I had never heard of before yesterday: Sayonara. It was featured on OMG! UBUNTU! earlier this month, and it was their feature that attracted me when I discovered it. Sayonara purports to be a lightweight media player with good performance (even for large media collections), low CPU usage, and low memory consumption. That sounds like a winner! It looks fairly attractive in my opinion, so I decided to try it.
 
 
18119cc862a625ce8ccef36fbb934b68.png
 
 
0f69e237d6c0d8c3bc6f55f5e7415133.png
 

I have only used Sayonara for a day at this point, but I like it so far. It definitely doesn't strike me as immensely better than Rhythmbox, but so far I like it about as well as my Rhythmbox 2.97 setup. The only negative I have encountered so far is that the author's Debian packaging is absolutely awful - after looking at it I'm not even sure how they manage to build packages for Ubuntu from it - and their build documentation is categorically wrong in several places. After I spent a few hours last night writing my own Debian packaging and patching out upstream's mistakes, it seems to work fairly well.

Has anyone else here tried Sayonara? What are your opinions on it? Do you know of any other open-source music players I have yet to try that might fit my requirements?

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1173217-sayonara-player/
Share on other sites

Don't have much of an opinion on it (Spotify addict myself :p), but it certainly looks pretty decent. Nice find! Is the developer(s?) accepting patches? Might be worth seeing if your mods to the package would be of value.

Most of my patches are specific to my Debian packaging, so I don't expect the author to accept those. I will submit the couple of patches that are generic back upstream, but they are fairly trivial. My complaint is mostly with documentation and upstream's Debian packaging, not with anything broken in the software or build system - that looks to be in good shape.

 

If anyone is interested in taking a look at my sources, you can download them from the links below. I also linked to the package I built for Debian Jessie armhf, but I don't expect that to be useful to many other people.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62647756/repos/apt/debian/pool/main/s/sayonara-player/sayonara-player_0.4.0-r695-1.dsc

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62647756/repos/apt/debian/pool/main/s/sayonara-player/sayonara-player_0.4.0-r695-1.debian.tar.gz

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62647756/repos/apt/debian/pool/main/s/sayonara-player/sayonara-player_0.4.0-r695.orig.tar.xz

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62647756/repos/apt/debian/pool/main/s/sayonara-player/sayonara_0.4.0-r695-1_armhf.deb

I really like the changes in the newest rhythmbox versions personally... Currently using 2.99 and am happy with it. The old toolbar layout prior to version 2.97 was awful, and had annoying bugs like the song title text being cut off on the bottom, and making horrible use of vertical space.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Posts

    • I literally tried to install it on my PC today and it crashed upon every start up. I tried all the tricks, terminate and remove cache, uninstall, reinstall, reboot, install via winget.. in the end I had my call with Brad Wardell on Google Meet. Oh I also tried Teams on the web, and got no video or audio (yes I allowed mic and camera).
    • Microsoft explains how it made Teams so much faster in 2026 by Usama Jawad Microsoft Teams is Redmond's flagship online communication and collaboration tool, primarily used in enterprise, government, and school environments. It regularly receives updates, with Microsoft frequently revealing features currently in development as well, such as Efficiency Mode and a dedicated app for meeting recaps. Now, the company has shed some light on the backend enhancements it has made to its popular software in 2026. During the first half of 2026, switching between chats has become 20% faster on desktop and web, which is especially great for less powerful devices or hardware on weak networks. Microsoft explains that it tracks two types of chat switches. The first is a warm switch, which relates to returning to a recent chat, in which case it is most likely already present in memory and should load extremely fast. The other is a cold switch where a chat that hasn't been opened recently is now opened. Naturally, the second type of chat switch was causing the most notable latency spikes. Microsoft realized that this was happening because of three reasons. First, the query to fetch conversation data was being fired too late. Next, queries were being sent sequentially, increasing the overall round-trip time. Finally, there was no handling of response priority, which meant that non-critical responses would sometimes block the main thread. Microsoft solved all of these problems by firing the data query immediately, bundling queries to be sent together so that they wouldn't create a "waterfall" effect, and enabling faster painting of the frame. As a result, warm and cold switches now have almost the same latency, and the only distinguishable difference between them is due to the data layer response time. Next, Microsoft focused on reducing app hangs and freezes on macOS and iOS by 35%. On macOS, the company has a health monitor thread running in the background that does exactly what it says on the tin. The tech firm built a dedicated StackDecoder tool to analyze health monitor's output at scale. Through this combination, it decided to move several error reporting and monitoring threads either to the background or treated them as an asynchronous call so that they wouldn't block the main thread, causing Teams to freeze. On iOS, the same result was accomplished through optimization of computations, caching, offloading operations from the main thread, refactoring database access behaviors, deferring non-critical tasks, and more. On a related note, it also made people search 25% on iOS by optimizing the query pipeline, and efficient database task queuing and scheduling. However, Microsoft has emphasized that improving Teams' performance is an ongoing endeavor, and that it hopes that these efforts will continue to make the software a reliable partner in online communication scenarios. On a related note, Microsoft recently unveiled some upcoming performance upgrades for OneDrive on macOS too, and you can check those out here.
  • Recent Achievements

    • First Post
      StaticMatrix earned a badge
      First Post
    • Week One Done
      StaticMatrix earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • Rookie
      lamborghiniv10 went up a rank
      Rookie
    • One Month Later
      pinnclepd earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • First Post
      X-No-file earned a badge
      First Post
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      520
    2. 2
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      210
    3. 3
      +Edouard
      147
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      96
    5. 5
      ATLien_0
      84
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!