- Name of the software: Mellow Player
- Project Homepage: https://colinduquesnoy.gitlab.io/MellowPlayer/
- Why: Mellow Player is a music player that acts as a wrapper for the web versions of cloud music apps, like Deezer, Spotify and Tidal. Considering many of those services don't offer native Linux apps, users of those services are forced to use the services in a browser page. Mellow Player offers a "native" app for running the web page, integrating with the desktop environment, offering keyboard shortcuts, system tray integration and desktop notifications. The only other player I know that does something like that would be Nuvola Player, which, as far as I'm aware, is also not available in the repository. Advantages of Mellow Player over Nuvola is that Mellow Player is completely Free Software, without any shady telemetry, personal information gathering or Premium versions (Nuvola has all 3 of those). Mellow Player offers a flatpack for easy installation, but it requires the download of around 700MB of dependencies that would be already in the system, at least for users of Solus Plasma Edition, so I recon a package would offer a benefit to users.
- Is it open source: It's licensed under GPL 2.0, as per their homepage
- Link to the latest version: https://gitlab.com/ColinDuquesnoy/MellowPlayer/-/archive/3.6.7/MellowPlayer-3.6.7.tar.gz
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I'm not sure I see the benefit of this seeing as Spotify is available via Flatpak and Snap, and other services should be handled by any browser that supports the MediaStream API, such as Firefox. Beyond that, browsers like Firefox expose these "streams" over MPRIS, allowing us to handle it using hardware keys. The only difference is this presents it in a different UX and as we say in our Package Inclusion Policy:
If the newly requested package offers no functionality above that of an alternative already in the repositories, it will very likely be rejected. “It’s pretty” is never a sufficient reason.
In this case, at this stage, browsers are the alternatives and they aren't tied down to what version of Blink is being used by QtWebEngine in a specific version of Qt either.
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Yeah, as I said, the biggest advantage is that this has a little better DE integration than Firefox, and it's more lightweight than opening a full fledged web browser just to open the web service.
But, as I've also said, it offers a flatpack that allows for easy installation in Solus, so although the inclusion of the package would be nice, it's not absolutely necessary, and I see no problems in it being denied.
My current system is a bit temporary, when I get a fixed rig where it's worth to take the time to set up a dev environment (which may happen in 2-3 months, depending on money issues), I may maintain the package myself, if that's allowed.
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From the Gitlab repo:
Cloud music integration for your desktop -> NOT MAINTAINED ANYMORE!