Meet BeatBox! - Another Cool Music Player from the Elementary Project!

If Elementary OS designers can keep working like this... I think in the future they have an opportunity to built a little empire of their own without a doubt. Currently they have a file manager, a gorgeous theme, mail client, application menu interface, etc ... and now the latest is the long awaited music player called Beatbox!.

It somewhere around last year, DanRabbit create a mockup showing the initial ideas about a new music player and few days ago they've released it (still in its very early stages 0.1 version), finally. And according to them, this will be the default audio player in their next Elementary OS release as well (obviously).

And to be honest, it's not so different from Banshee or any other player that we've seen so far concerning the interface... but since we all know for a fact that GNU/Linux developers (especially Gnome team and Canonical) loves Mac OSX's idea of simplicity... which elementary also seems to closely follow, the Beatbox player is by default is designed to be simple. Minimal distractions.

The original "Mock-up" from Danrabbit.

Last.fm support to playing mp3, Ogg vorbis, WAV, Flac, etc to managing large collections of audio files, Beatbox seems pretty impressive even at this early stage. Does it support Unity?, of course. But this is written using the Vala programming language thus you'll have to make sure it's installed it first.

If your Ubuntu distribution has outdated Vala libraries, then you'll have to update it to a recent version.

To do that, first enter the below command.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vala-team
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install valac
valac --version

If the version indicates 0.12 (or higher) then you're good to go. If your Vala version is below that, then use the below command.

sudo apt-get install vala-0.12

So if you want to install Beatbox in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, then open your Terminal window and issue the below command.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sgringwe/beatbox
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install beatbox