Audience: A Slick, Minimalistic Linux Media Player

Audience is a new media player written in Vala that "brings the lessons learned from the web home to the desktop".

The application uses a slick, clutter-based user interface and is designed to play videos without getting in your way, with controls displayed in a semi-transparent overlay that uses autohide and a seek bar that shows a thumbnail preview for a given mark in the video, eliminating the need to manually seek to see what happens at a certain point in the video. For the menu, Audience uses an elementary-style AppMenu instead of a classic menu bar:

Audience doesn't have any settings and the only thing you can configure are the subtitles (language), though some options like lock / unlock window resizing to the aspect ration of the current video, enable/disable video resuming and others are available in Dconf.

Here's a short video I've just recorded with Audience media player in action:


(direct video link)

Install Audience in Ubuntu

Before installing, please note that Audience is not stable yet! The application is available in a daily PPA, for testing purposes only. To install it in Ubuntu 11.10, you'll also have to add a PPA that provides Granite and the one for the latest Vala (this isn't required for Ubuntu 12.04).

Granite is available in the elementary testing PPA - add it using the following command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elementary-os/testing

To add the Vala PPA (not required for Ubuntu 12.04), use the following command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vala-team/ppa

And finally, to add the Audience PPA and install Audience media player in Ubuntu 11.10 or 12.04, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:audience-members/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audience

At the time I'm writing this, the Ubuntu Precise 64bit package failed to build. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.


Arch Linux users can install Audience from AUR.

For other Linux distributions, you can get the code via Launchpad.

Audience is currently under heavy development and you will find bugs! Report them @ Launchpad.

Source