[Review] Mu Music Player: Looks Good, Works Fine

In an earlier article about less known Linux music players, a reader Gábor Bálint notified me of another obscure music player Mu.

As I like to experiment with new applications, especially if it’s open source software, I decided to give it a try and now I am sharing it with you here.

Features of Mu music player

First of all, the music player is actually written as μ, the greek letter. But I’ll be using Mu in this article for easier reading. It is an open source software and you can find the source code on GitHub repository.

Some of the main features of Mu music player are:

sleek, dark-themed modern interface
fast search option
option to fetch lyrics from the internet
album art display
option to save and upload album art
option to change the display to main player or mini player
support for a variety of music files
cross platform, available for Windows and MacOS apart from Linux

Experience with Mu music player

The first thing you’ll notice is the interface. It’s dark themed and sleek. It is divided into 5 tabs, namely Songs, Artist, Album, Genre and Playlist. I liked the interface.

You can import your music files in here. Only one folder at a time is allowed. The default interface looks like this:

Mus music player interface — Default interface with music files

Once the files are added to the music player, it will stay there until you manually delete it (just from the player, not from disk). The trouble starts when you want to add more music files. There is no option to add more files.

The only way possible is to drag and drop new files to the player to add it. And you might know that drag and drop in Ubuntu Unity interface is often a pain.

There is an option to change the view to a “main player”. Mu tries to get lyrics on its own based on the song name and if it finds the lyrics, it is displayed in the main player view.

However, in the case below, the lyrics was not correct. And I didn’t see any option to stop displaying lyrics.

Main Player view of Mu music player — Main player view with automatically recognized yet incorrect lyrics

There is another view called Mini player. It basically minifies the interface and gives you a tiny horizontal strip to access the controls:

Mini player view of Mu music player — Mini player view

Sound quality is fine. I didn’t notice any difference in the audio quality between Mu and Rhythmbox.

One thing worth noting is that it didn’t blend in Ubuntu Unity environment. You cannot access the global menu. Moreover, it didn’t even integrate with the sound menu. So, no quick access through media keys on your computer.