14 DAY TRIAL // GNOME Music 3.22 is on its way, as well as the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, due for release next month on September 21, and it looks like we're now able to get an early taste of what's coming in GNOME's default music playback app.
GNOME Music 3.22 Beta has been released, distributed as part of the first Beta development milestone of the upcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, and it promises to offer better sorting of tracks in the Artists and Albums views, a "new playlist" entry to the Playlist dialog, and new keyboard shortcuts.
There's also a Shortcuts window to go with it the new keyboard shortcuts, and we can't help but notice some significant performance improvements to the Albums view thanks to the move to the Gtk::FlowBox widget of the latest GTK+ 3.22 GUI toolkit. Moreover, the codebase style (PEP-8) was cleaned up and docstrings are now used.
Bug fixes, updated translation
There's no new development release of an open-source software project without some bug fixes, and according to the internal changelog attached below, GNOME Music 3.22 Beta (technical version number is 3.21.90) fixes the MPRIS repeatmode, the sidelist shadow, and no longer leaks information over HTTP through unregister sources and Grilo, which was bumped to version 0.3.1 as a minimal requirement.
Moreover, it looks like version 1.8 of the Tracker search engine, search tool and metadata storage system is being used for titled playlists, some ambiguity with the song's author/artist was resolved, the Gtk::SearchBar widget is used for the search bar, tracks are now displayed only once in music listing, playlists are included only from the Music folder, and static ones are now listed on top.
Last but not least, this first Beta build of GNOME Music 3.22 also updates the Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, French, Friulian, Slovak, Czech, Indonesian, Brazilian, Portuguese, German, Hungarian, Finnish, Polish, and Portuguese language translations. You can download the GNOME Music 3.22 Beta sources right now via our website, but please try to keep in mind that this is still a pre-release version and bugs might be present.