Check out Monophony, a new GTK4/libadwaita apps that hit Flathub this week. It lets you play music from YouTube without needing the ‘video’ bit.
Just enter a search term (e.g., song title) to fetch a list of matching results ordered by album, song, playlist, etc. You can choose to play an entire album or play specific tracks from it.
The app also shows other matching results under “video” (e.g., live recordings, interviews, etc). Despite the “video” heading for those you still only get audio.
Use Monophony’s “save to library” feature on albums and playlists to add content you can access from the main page of the app. You can also create custom playlists to add specific tracks to. These also show on the main page.
Controls wise you get play, previous, and next; shuffle; and a “loop” option (it may loop playlists but in my testing it only ever loops the song playing at the time you click the icon). There’s also a clickable link to open the playing video on YouTube in your distro’s default web browser.
For those times you don’t know what you want to play, just pick a track and enable “radio mode” to let the app play (what I assume are the videos YouTube comments watching next) music without any further input.
Monophony works without requiring you to sign-in with a YouTube or Google account. That’s a pro — privacy — and a con – there’s no easy way to export or transfer your custom playlists to use elsewhere.
There are a few missing features, such as no album art or video thumbnails, or a way to run the app “in the background” when closing the main window.
But all in all, Monophony is off to a sound start.
→ Get Monophony on Flathub.
