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Decibels Audio Player

A Simple, Modern Audio Player

Decibels is a modern and elegant audio player for the GNOME desktop. It is built on a philosophy of simplicity, designed to do one thing exceptionally well: play audio files.

Unlike full-featured music library applications like Rhythmbox, Decibels does not manage a collection of music. Instead, it focuses on providing a clean, straightforward experience for playing individual sound files. Its signature feature is a beautiful waveform display that allows for easy and precise navigation through the audio track.

This makes it the perfect tool for quickly listening to a downloaded podcast, a voice memo, or a new song without the overhead of importing files into a library.

Installation

The recommended way to install Decibels on Rocky Linux is as a Flatpak from the Flathub repository. This method ensures you have the latest version of the application, sandboxed from the rest of your system.

1. Enable Flathub

First, ensure you have Flatpak installed and the Flathub remote configured on your system.

# Install the Flatpak package
sudo dnf install flatpak

# Add the Flathub remote repository
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Note

You may need to log out and log back in for Flatpak applications to appear in the GNOME Activities Overview.

2. Install Decibels

Once Flathub is enabled, you can install Decibels with a single command:

flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Decibels

Basic Usage

After installation, you can launch Decibels from the GNOME Activities Overview by searching for "Decibels".

To play a file:

  1. Launch the application. You will be greeted by a clean, simple window.
  2. Click the prominent "Open a File..." button in the center of the window.
  3. Use the file chooser to navigate to and select an audio file on your system (e.g., an .mp3, .flac, .ogg, or .wav file).
  4. The file will open, and its waveform will be displayed. Playback will begin automatically.

Key Features

While simple, Decibels has several useful features:

  • Waveform Navigation: Instead of a simple progress bar, Decibels shows the audio's waveform. You can click anywhere on the waveform to instantly seek to that part of the track.
  • Playback Speed Control: A control in the bottom-right corner allows you to adjust the playback speed, which is perfect for speeding up podcasts or slowing down audio for transcription.
  • Quick Skip Buttons: Dedicated buttons allow you to jump backward or forward by 10-second intervals, making it easy to re-listen to a missed phrase.

Decibels is an excellent choice for anyone who needs a simple, elegant, and modern application for playing individual audio files on the GNOME desktop.

Author: Wale Soyinka