Khövsgöl is a minimal, highly configurable music player and browser, which can easily handle very large collections of music. It's designed for the GNOME desktop, but can run well in other environments. Khövsgöl works fine as a standalone player, but can also be used to remotely control music daemons such as MPD.

Khövsgöl is designed to be sensible and straightforward to use. It can help you quickly access what you want to hear, and can also help you browse through your collection when you don't know what you want. We hope you get as much pleasure from Khövsgöl's minimalism as you do from the sounds it organizes for you. (Some people would call it a "music player," but there's no reason why it can't deal with non-music: any collection of sounds organized into tracks and albums, such as audio books, recorded radio, etc. Anyway, what some people call "music," others call "noise.") Here are a few examples of what makes Khövsgöl particularly nice.

*Free of clutter! If you have whole albums queued on your playlist, don't you get annoyed when other track players show you row after row of the same information? It's the same artist and the same album. You would think there would be a better design! Khövsgöl, at the push of a button, hides all this repeated information, and puts a clear heading over tracks from the same album. It can also recognize if the album is a "compilation" (has tracks by various artists) and display accordingly.

*It's all in the browser! All the tracks are available in one browser, which can change its organizational structure at the touch of the button. Browse by artists, tracks, albums, genres, even decades. Filter the view according to a few quick keystrokes. If you're finicky and patient, you can even configure your own organizational structure, suiting one more way you think of your collection. You can create your own compilations (what other track players call "playlists") in the very same browser by dragging and dropping tracks. It's as fun as creating a mix tape. There's no separate "playlist" area in Khövsgöl. It's all in the browser, which you can hide away at the click of a button when you're not browsing.

*Tags or directories? Your choice! Khövsgöl can index your collections of tracks according to their embedded tags. But, in case your tags are a mess, it can also work according to a configurable directory and filename structure, such as artist -> album -> track number - track name. If you can't be bothered with the vast amount of work required to carefully tag a large collection, Khövsgöl is for you.

*Technologically savvy! Khövsgöl is immediately usable as it is, capable of playing most track types (mp3, ogg, flac, etc.) and indexing fairly large collections. However, according to your needs, Khövsgöl supports other technologies. For example, it can use a data server (such as MySQL) for its index, to increase capacity and performance for handling very large collections. Or, it can let a server (such as the Music Player Daemon) handle all the work, both playing music and indexing it. In fact, this is a recommended scenario if you aren't feature-hungry, and is Khövsgöl at its leanest and meanest! If you're an audiophile who wants as much control over sound as Khövsgöl provides over organization, then you can let Khövsgöl do the indexing, and use a powerful player (such as XMMS) for the sound.

Because Khövsgöl deals with all these technologies through a simple abstraction layer, it's quite easy for developers to add support for other indexing or playing technologies. The Name: Khövsgöl is the name of a beautiful lake in Mongolia. We hope the purity of its waters cleanses this software from bloat and detritus. The Khalkh Mongolian pronunciation of the word is as follows: "kh" is pronounced like the "ch" in Bach; the "ö" vowel is somewhere between a mid-western American "oo" as in "booth" and a "o" as in "oar"; the "l" is a breathy sound, half-consonant, half-vowel, somewhere between an English "dark L" and a "th" sound, and somewhat like the Welsh double-L. Stress is on the first syllable.

Requirements:

· Python

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Logging to file
· FreeDesktop notifications
· Pidgin status
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