A new version of Google Music Frame – the user-created desktop app for accessing Google’s cloud-based music player – has been released.
New Stuff
The smallest but perhaps most noticeable change is a slick new application icon. Admittedly this is a minor change, but it’s one that gives the application an extra bit of polish.
Version 0.2 also boasts initial support for userscripts (allowing the scrobble-addicted amongst us to report our plays back to Last.FM from within the app). Installing userscripts is the most user-friendly of procedures at present, but i’m just happy support for them is there at all.
As shown above a Unity quicklist with easily-accessible playback controls is available for Unity users. Users of Docky, AvantWindow Navigator and DockBarX are also able to benefit from “quicklist” integration, as are any other DockManager compliant docks.
Multimedia key support has now been added to the app, and for those users without multimedia keys the “Pause” key (also known as the “break” key) can be ‘enabled’ to act as a multimedia key for pausing/resuming music.
To enable this open the Google Music Frame configuration file located in ~.config/google-music-frame/main.conf and add ‘pause_key = on‘ (sans the quote marks) to the end of the file.
Remember to hit ‘Save’ before exiting, and to restart the application for the feature to take effect.
Google Music: What Is It?
Google Music Beta launched back in May of this year, offering anyone who signs up the ability to upload 20,000 music tracks for free access and streaming through the web and mobile devices wherever they are in the world. As tracks played in Google Music are cached locally the app does retain a degree of offline functionality.
Google launched a Linux version of the Google Music Manager (required for uploading tracks to the service) back in July.
Installing, Upgrading to Google Music Frame 0.2 for Ubuntu
Ubuntu 10.10, 11.04 and 11.10 users can grab Google Music Frame 0.2 from the Google Music Frame Releases PPA.
First add ‘ppa:janousek.jiri/google-music-frame-releases’ to your Software Sources, followed by running an update using Update Manager. After this you can search for and install ‘google-music-frame’ from the Ubuntu Software Centre.
If you want more information, or would prefer to compile from source, head over to launchpad.net/google-music-frame