FUPlayer is a full featured music manager and player for the GNOME desktop. With it, you can play music from your hard drive, create playlists, do real file management using its Trash, and play, rip, and burn audio CD's. It features an interface similar to those of many modern manager-style players, but with many improvements, such as true non-modal search and browse functionality, find-as-you-type, and drag destination highlighting. It aims to be extremely user friendly and efficient to use. It is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL 2.

I am writing FUPlayer in part to address a shortcoming on the GNOME desktop, to help fix Bug #1 in Ubuntu: Microsoft has a majority market share. People love music, and they should be able to love their music player too. When it comes to loving an application, interface is everything. Despite still being early in its development, FUPlayer already has an excellent interface, has very good work flow, if you will. As its interface is my top priority, it should just get better.

The next major release, 0.3.0, will focus on perfecting the interface, improving performance, and finishing the core functionality. The major release after that, 0.4.0, will include the initial implementation of my secret weapon: integrated music sharing. You see, I am also writing FUPlayer to address another concern: MP3 and other patent-encumbered multimedia formats have a majority market share. So my stab at this problem is to write a music suite that (1) only rips to free formats, (2) only shares music in these free formats, and (3) is by far the most effective and safest way to share music.

Lastly, I am writing FUPlayer because I need to earn a living somehow, and I would like to earn it developing free software. Out of ethical objection, I do not wish to develop non-free software. Furthermore, I am trying to avoid a normal 9-5 job, because one of my dreams is be a competitive road bicycle racer for a time while I am still young enough to do so. I need daylight hours free for training and frequently need 3 day weekends for races. So for a while anyway, I hope to interest enough people in sponsoring the development of FUPlayer that I can get by. I will train during the day, hack on FUPlayer in the evenings (and late into the night, as always), and race on weekends. And that would be living the dream.

Happy hacking,
Jason Gerard DeRose

The FUPlayer 0.2.x series is the first that I consider stable and feature complete enough to recommend to the everyday user. However, it is still alpha software and must be approached with a certain spirit of adventure!

One point of caution: FUPlayer does have a Trash, from which you can permanently delete music files from your hard disk. As FUPlayer is still alpha software, if you plan to use it for some serious spring cleaning in your music library, please make a backup of your entire library first.