Atraci is a new open source music player which uses YouTube as a source. The app supports creating playlists and comes with some basic features like repeat, shuffle and so on.
The application, available for Linux, Windows and Mac, uses an interface somewhat similar to Popcorn Time (built using Node.js) and, according to its homepage, it allows you to listen to more than 60 million songs, "100% Free. No Ads. No Sign up. And Legal".
 |
| A playlist in Atraci |
Here's how it works: when searching, Atraci uses iTunes, Last.fm and SoundCloud to display song results which include the album cover, the song title and artist. For playback, the application uses YouTube to "stream the highest quality videos", at least that's what the application GitHub page says but from my test, I can tell you that the app doesn't seem to be able to play 1080p videos, most probably because YouTube uses DASH for all 1080p videos.
Atraci supports playing videos however, because it was created to be used as a music player, it lacks some features when it comes to videos: you can't select the video quality and you can't play full-screen videos (but you can maximize the player window):
Atraci features:
- play more than 60 million tracks / videos
- top tracks, featured artist sections
- supports playlists with shuffle and repeat options
- track search autocomplete
- 2 views which support sorting by track or artist
- history of recently played tracks
The application is about one month old, so there are many things which can be improved or added. Its roadmap page links to a list of open bugs which includes some interesting feature requests like a recommendation system, lyrics support, an option to get the current playing song url, proxy support, last.fm/libre.fm scrobbling support and more - hopefully at least some of these will be added in future releases.
Install Atraci in Ubuntu / Linux Mint
Note: the application uses Node.js and Launchpad doesn't support building such packages, so the PPA package downloads and installs the latest Atraci binary from GitHub.
Ubuntu (and derivatives) / Linux Mint users can install Atraci by using the WebUpd8 Atraci PPA. To add the PPA and install the application, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/atraci
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install atraciFor other Linux distributions (for Ubuntu as well, if you don't want to use the PPA above), Windows or Mac OS X, download Atraci from GitHub.
To run it on Linux, extract the downloaded archive, make the "Atraci" file executable (in Nautilus / Nemo: right click the file, select "Properties" and on the "Permissions" tab, enable "Allow executing file as program") and double click it.
Report any bugs related to the packaging in the comments below or, if you encounter bugs related to the application, report them @ GitHub.
For a somewhat similar application, but for the command line, see: New Command Line YouTube Player And Downloader With Local Playlists Support: mps-youtube
Thanks to Daniel for the tip!
