Sayonara Player

[Karl L.]

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.
 
 

 
 

 

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?

[+Majesticmerc MVC]

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.

[Karl L.]

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

[ViperAFK]

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.