Nuvola Player 2.0 released with Amazon Cloud Player, refreshed interface, HTML5 support and numerous additions (official PPA available)
Nuvola Player is a pleasant-to-the-eye music player, designed with incorporating cloud-based music services into a fancy desktop interface in mind, allowing the user to play millions and millions of music tracks from one global desktop-integrated application (without a web-browser).
Nuvola Player 2.0 has been released, presenting itself as a major update to the previous 1.0.5 version, introducing, refining, polishing, fixing, etc, numerous internal components.
The 2.0 release introduces a refreshed service selector, removing the filled-with-details service-specific rectangles and adding the supported services into its left area, clicking on a service, summons a bottom bar, from where Use this service is to be clicked (clicking on it, exposes a preview of the clicked service without actually launching the service, thus the user is able, by clicking on another service, to hassle-free switch to another service).
Nuvola Player 2.0 integrates the Amazon Cloud Player, allowing the user to benefit a new extra music service.
Preferences have been reorganized, categorizing existing features in extensions under Preferences-->Extensions, being disabled by default; in order to activate extensions, check preferred extensions, such as Last FM scrobbling, Unity Quicklist (adds extra entries to Nuvola Player's Unity launcher quicklist), Notifications, etc.
Extensions, in order to be tweaked, feature a Preferences button, useful to adjust extensions, like for instance, checking Preferences-->Last FM scrobbling and clicking Preferences, allow the user to enable Last.fm scrobbling (by authorizing it).
An interesting aspect of the cloud-based music player is its maneuvering of extra preferences per in-progress used music services, meaning, running Grooveshark and navigating to Preferences-->Service, displays an empty, without extra preferences panel, yet, running Google Play Music and navigating to Preferences-->Service, exposes two new clickable extra preferences (Hide Google Bar and Don't stop playback due to inactivity).
Related to the playing experience, the newly released 2.0 version allows the user to enable automatic play, consequently, auto playing tracks after the application is started (option dependent on the last visited page).
Enable automatic music play at launch by navigating to Preferences-->check Automatically start playback on start-up (if possible).
Only toolbar is now set as the default view, furthermore, grouping menus "inside" of the top-right "cog" icon.
Lyrics are now (on demand) part of the music experience, exposing lyrics related to the played song via a right-side panel; activate lyrics under Preferences-->Extensions-->Lyrics fetching
A definitely interesting addition targeted at under-the-hood changes, is the new HTML5 usage for playback instead of the Flash plugin (supported services: Google Play Music, 8tracks, Amazon Cloud Player).
The mentioned new features and visual refinements, as well as numerous fixes, optimizations and command-line support (Nuvola Player can be managed via the terminal by typing the command nuvolaplayer-client) come to deliver a definitely both improved and refreshed Nuvola Player version.
How do we install Nuvola Player 2.0?
Add the following official PPA (Lucid, Natty, Oneiric, Precise)
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nuvola-player-builders/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nuvolaplayer
Worth mentioning
Installing Nuvola Player from the above PPA will install Nuvola Player version 1.1 for Lucid and Natty, version containing the above mentioned features, yet bearing a different version number due to its targeted (supported until April 2013) Ubuntu version (featuring GTK+ inferior to 3.4 version).
