blaplay is a media player for GNU/Linux with a clean and uncluttered user interface. It is written in Python and uses PyGTK, PyGST and Mutagen to implement its core functionality. Notable features include a monitored media library, automatic cover art, lyrics and biography fetching, as well as support for internet radio streams and video playback. It tightly integrates last.fm's web services to support scrobbling, manage favorite songs, retrieve song and artist metadata, and provide event and release recommendations based on the user's last.fm library.

blaplay currently includes audio visualizations based on fftw3 which are written in Cython to push computationally expensive operations to C code. Building blaplay therefore requires a recent version of the Cython compiler as well as the single-precision library of fftw3 and its development headers. To prepare and run blaplay locally, issue

  $ ./setup.py build_ext --inplace
  $ ./blaplay.py

after having satisfied all build dependencies. To install blaplay system-wide and run it, simply issue

  $ ./setup.py install
  $ blaplay

Below is a list of dependencies and recommended packages. Considering the heterogeneity of Linux distributions and package naming conventions, the following dependencies correspond to their respective Debian package names.

• python-dev (>= 2.7)
• Cython (>= 0.15.1)
• libfftw3-dev (>= 3.2.2)

• python (>= 2.7)
• python-gtk2 (>= 2.22)
• python-gst0.10
• python-numpy
• python-mutagen (>= 1.19)
• python-gobject (>= 2.21)
• libfftw3-3 (>= 3.2.2)

• gstreamer0.10-plugins-good
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
• python-keybinder
• python-dbus (>= 0.83)

Note that the shebang of both setup.py and blaplay.py reads:

#!/usr/bin/env python2

This conforms to the way Arch Linux (among others) treats different Python versions these days where `python' is usually symlinked to some version of Python 3, while `python2' refers to the latest installed version of Python 2.