I (@multani) don't use Sonata much anymore and as a consequence, I've been very slow to answer even to the few bugs reported and pull requests from external contributors.

If you are still interested in Sonata and would like to see it alive again, please contact me by email to see what we can do!

Sonata is a client for the Music Player Daemon featuring:

• Expanded and collapsed views, fullscreen album art mode
• Automatic remote and local album art
• Library browsing by folders, or by genre/artist/album
• User-configurable columns
• Automatic fetching of lyrics and covers
• Playlist and stream support
• Support for editing song tags
• Drag-and-drop to copy files
• Popup notification
• Library and playlist searching, filter as you type
• Audioscrobbler (Last.fm) 1.2 support
• Multiple MPD profiles
• Keyboard friendly
• Support for multimedia keys
• Commandline control
• Available in 24 languages

Sonata is written using the Python programming language and uses the GTK 3 toolkit.

Sonata started as a fork of the Pygmy project and is licensed under the GPLv3 or later. Thanks to Andrew Conkling et al, for all their hard work on Pygmy!

In order to run Sonata, you will need the following dependencies:

• Python >= 3.2
• PyGObject (aka Python GObject Introspection) (3.7.4 or more recommended, earlier versions may also work)
• GTK >= 3.4
• python-mpd2 >= 0.4.6
• MPD >= 0.15 (possibly on another computer)
• tagpy >= 2013.1 for editing metadata (Optional)
• dbus-python for multimedia keys (Optional)

Sonata can currently be downloaded from the Git repository using:

$ git clone git://github.com/multani/sonata.git
$ cd sonata

To run Sonata, you can either install it in a dedicated directory (as root):

# python setup.py install

Or you can run it straight from the directory (without prior installation):

$ ./run-sonata

You can find on the website official releases of Sonata packaged in various distributions.

This development version of Sonata is also available in several distributions:

• Archlinux: available in AUR as sonata-git

• Gentoo: available in the stuff overlay:

  sudo layman -a stuff
  sudo emerge -av =sonata-9999

You can find the official documentation on Sonata's website <http://www.nongnu.org/sonata/documentation.html>.

You can ask for feature requests or report bugs on Github at <https://github.com/multani/sonata/issues>.

There's a (somewhat alive) mailing list available at <https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/sonata-users>.

You can also find Sonata in other places on the Internet:

• http://sonata.berlios.de/ : this was the original Sonata website but Berlios shut down this hosting facility somewhere in March 2014 along with the mailing list.
• http://codingteam.net/project/sonata/ : this is another fork with a different team and different perspectives. Our code bases diverge quite a bit now.

• Copyright 2006-2009 Scott Horowitz <stonecrest@gmail.com>
• Copyright 2009-2013 Jonathan Ballet <jon@multani.info>

Sonata is currently developed by Jonathan Ballet <jon@multani.info> and other contributors. Many thanks to the past developers:

• Scott Horowitz <stonecrest@gmail.com>
• Tuukka Hastrup <Tuukka.Hastrup@iki.fi>
• Stephen Boyd <bebarino@gmail.com>