14 DAY TRIAL // There is more to GNOME than just the desktop environment. GNOME is a stack of apps, and many of those applications are constantly improved and worked on. Allan Day, one of GNOME's designers and developers, detailed some of the changes that are being made to the Music app.
The Music app in GNOME is not the most complex application of its kind, and there is a lot of room for improvement. As you can imagine, the GNOME devs do plan to improve it quite a bit and Allan Day outline some of the new features that are going to land. This is an important component of the GNOME stack, so it's not really a surprise that some big modifications are incoming.
GNOME 3.16 is already out for quite some time, and it has been received very well. In fact, it's has been implemented already in a number of other distros, and you can find it in various repos. Some of you might even notice that the Music app is not present by default in many distros, despite being an integral part of the stack, but that might change once it becomes much better.
GNOME's Music is getting better
The future of GNOME's Music apps is well defined by the developers, and it looks like music players that are focused on local collections are not going away anytime soon, but there are increasingly more apps that focus on cloud music and not user content.
"The first new feature that we have planned for Music is a new play queue interface. This is intended to give you quick access to what’s currently playing. You can also star tracks that are in the queue, such as the song you just listened to. While optical media isn't as popular as it used to be, it is still important for some users, and we want to make it simple and easy to rip a CD and add it to your music collection," wrote Allan Day on his blog.
The developer also explained that the only maintainer that works on GNOME's Music needs a lot of help, so if you want to get involved in the project, now would be a good time.