One of the members of the Arch Linux forums has been developing a new music manager that is advertised as being fast and lightweight. I have been following this thread for a couple of months and decided it is mature enough to try. Tonight I had some time on my hands so I compiled the svn version from the AUR (Arch User Repository). If you don't use Arch Linux, the source is also available at SourceForge.

The author states as his goal, "I have written a music manager called Consonance. It uses GTK+ and aims to be fast, bloat-free and light on memory consumption."

The author said one of the reasons he wrote Consonance was because he switched from KDE/Gnome to Fluxbox and needed a lightweight music manager. So I was expecting a featureless stripped down player. Boy was I surprised. Let me explain.

My music requirements are primarily just playing MP3 and Ogg files. XMMS is a good lightweight player when all I want is random background music, but XMMS isn't very adept at searching for and selecting songs by title or artist and playing from a queue. In other words, XMMS is a good lightweight music player, but not an adept music manager. Banshee and Rythmbox are very good music managers, but both are getting rather bloated. What I wanted was something in between these choices.

Enter Consonance.