Frequently Asked Questions

Installation

Does Quod Libet require GNOME?

No, but we recommend you install the GNOME libraries and Python bindings when using Quod Libet. If they are installed, Quod Libet will use a better tray icon and your default GNOME audio options.

I get gst.PluginNotFoundError: monkeysdec when starting Quod Libet.

This is due to a stale ape.py file lying around from Quod Libet 0.17 or earlier. You should remove formats/ape.py and formats/ape.pyc. In general, installing a new version of QL without first uninstalling the old version is not supported.

I'm running Gentoo, and…

We are not the first line of support for Gentoo Linux. If you are running Gentoo and experience problems, file a bug on the Gentoo bug tracking system at bugs.gentoo.org.

How do I install a plugin?

Click Music on the menu and select Plugins. Then check the box of any plugin you'd like to install. If the plugin you are looking for isn't listed there, download it from: http://www.sacredchao.net/quodlibet/wiki/Plugins. You shouldn't forget to save every plugin into its respective folder: event plugins into ~/.quodlibet/plugins/events subfolder etc.

General

Why don't all my songs appear in the playlist when I select their artist/album/genre/search for them?

Do you have a global filter in use? Check the Browsers tab in Music → Preferences.

My filenames with special characters (ú, ç, はあ, etc.) don't appear properly.

Unless told otherwise Quod Libet assumes your filesystem is using UTF-8 filenames (this is a standard assumption for GTK+ applications). To tell it otherwise, export G_FILENAME_ENCODING="iso-8859-1" (or whatever value you need) in your ~/.bashrc or other appropriate place. You can also use the magic value @locale to use the default character encoding for your locale.

I want keyboard shortcuts to change browsers (or anything else).

Put gtk-can-change-accels = 1 in ~/.gtkrc-2.0 (and restart Quod Libet). Then hover the mouse over the menu item you want to set an accelerator for, and press that key.

When using GNOME this setting can be toggled in Menus and Toolbars in the GNOME settings.

Player

How do I add the play count or skip count to the columns in the song list?

Add the ~#playcount and/or ~#skipcount tags to the song header list (in the "Others" field).

How do I get Quod Libet to play MP4/M4A files?

Install GStreamer FAAD support (in gst-plugins-bad), Quod Libet 0.25, and Mutagen 1.9 or above.

How do I prevent Quod Libet from locking the audio device?

If you use ALSA, you can enable ALSA dmix to have ALSA mix in software. In ALSA 1.0.9rc2 and higher this is enabled by default for soundcards that don't support hardware mixing. You can have other OSS apps use ALSA with the aoss wrapper supplied in the alsa-oss package (so they can share the audio device with Quod Libet). For older versions of Debian, you can enable dmix by copying /usr/share/doc/libasound2/examples/asound.conf_dmix to ~/.asoundrc. See the ALSA dmix guide for more information.

How do I use a different soundcard with Quod Libet?

See the chapter on configuring the audio backend in the user's guide.

Why does Quod Libet sort my songs out of order? (Or, Why does Quod Libet sort "A" before "a"?)

Music metadata, like music, comes in many languages, and sorting multilanguage text is hard to do. It depends on your language as well as the text being sorted, and often is still not well-defined. Unicode Technical Standard #10 outlines an algorithm to sort multilanguage text, but even then it needs ordinal data for each character for each language. We don't know of any Python implementations of it, and any implementation we use would have to be fast since we compare thousands of strings when sorting.

I have two albums with the same name, and they sort out of order/get merged in the Album List.

Tag them with different labelid tags (it's best if you use the actual label catalog ID, but if you can't find it you can also just use any different values). You can also use musicbrainz_albumid tags, which several other taggers can write.

I have two discs of the same album, and they don't get merged in the Album List.

Make sure they have the same name (i.e. without "(disc x)" on the end). If they are still not merged, they have different labelid or musicbrainz_albumid tags. If they have different label ID tags, delete the incorrect one. If they have different MusicBrainz album ID tags, add a labelid tag that is the same for both albums.

Can I show more than 0 to 4 notes when rating songs?

Close Quod Libet; in ~/.quodlibet/config find the ratings = 4 line. Change it to ratings = however many ratings you want. It's best if the value divides 100 evenly; multiples of 2 and 5 are good. You will need to use the ratings right-click menu to set ratings above 4.

How can I hide incomplete albums from the Album View

Enter #(tracks > 5) into the search box above the album list. This will only show albums with greater than than 5 tracks.

How can I list my tracks based on their ratings?

Right click somewhere on headers bar (which is below the search bar), select "Track Headers" from the menu and add "Ratings". Now if you click "Ratings" on the headers bar your tracks will be sorted based on their ratings.

My multimedia keys no longer work under GNOME

GNOME 2.18 implemented an undocumented and crappy D-Bus-based interface that takes control of the multimedia keys on your keyboard while you're running GNOME. Ronny Haryanto wrote a plugin to support this interface.

Tag Editing

I have a lot of ID3 tags in euc-kr/cp1251/windows-1252/latin-1024/insert favorite encoding here; can QL read them?

You can define a custom list of encodings to check. UTF-8 is always tried first, and Latin-1 is always tried last. To make your own list, close QL, open up ~/.quodlibet/config, and find the id3encoding option. You can enter any valid encodings here, separated by spaces, and they will be tried in order. If you have files already imported into your library with incorrect tags, you'll need to reload them.

Quod Libet saves ID3 tags in UTF-8 or UTF-16.

Media Devices

I see the iPod icon but nothing happens

  • Are libgpod and its Python bindings installed properly?
  • Is the D-Bus daemon started?
  • Is the D-Bus hal daemon started?
  • Is the device mounted?
  • Is the device mounted with the right permissions?

Other stuff

What does the name mean?

Quodlibet or Quod libet is Latin for "whatever you please" or "whatever you want", which is the kind of attitude we want to convey with QL: you control how you fiddle with your music. A quodlibet is also a type of musical composition, an improvisation by several players or vocalists at once, which is a pretty accurate description of QL's development.

Ex falso quodlibet, or "from a falsehood, whatever you please" is one of the properties of material implication (if/then) in classical logics; in standard notation it can be written as ∀A (⊥ → A).

Finally, the initial directory imported into Subversion was named ql, because I was experimenting with a syntax for a query language.

Where do the release names come from?

Daily Dinosaur Comics at the time of the release.

I like <my favorite player>, so I won't use Quod Libet!

Okay. We think Quod Libet beats other players in the areas where it counts (where exactly it does count is undecided; 'tag editing', 'massive libraries', and 'regexp searching' have all been cited); we didn't like the other players. If you do, continue using them. You still might want to check out Ex Falso, since while there's an awful lot of media players out there, there's not much else in the way of tag editors. You could also help us make Quod Libet better.

Ok, I am sold but how do I import playlists, ratings and other data from <my favorite player> to Quod Libet!