Jajuk is a full-featured Java-based application for organizing and playing music, geared toward advanced users with large or scattered music collections.
When you launch Jajuk, you see all your music, even if it is not directly available, as might be the case with a detached network drive or CD-ROM. You can perform searches or complex operations instantly because all your collection is already loaded into memory, not scanned from the disks.
The software presents different aspects of a music collection, such as an album catalog, lyrics, or playlist editor, as views. You can display multiple views together as perspectives, and you can move and resize views within a perspective.
Jajuk features a rating system that learns what tracks you like most based on the frequency you listen to them, but also allows you to increase or decrease the ratings manually. A digital DJ can create a playlist for you based on criteria you provide in advance. You can use any of several criteria, including ratings and genre, or you can group several genres into what Jajuk calls an ambience, and use that as well.
You can use Jajuk as a full-screen application, or via a slimbar space-saving interface. If the GUI isn’t fast enough for you, there are hotkeys for some operations, such as replaying the current album or switching to the next one. Jajuk even features an advanced alarm clock.
Jajuk traces its origins back to 2003, when French developer Bertrand Florat was using JuK under Linux. “It was far too basic,” he recalls. “I needed many more features, and most of all a persistent collection – no full scan at each startup.” Today Florat leads a large global team of developers who work on the project. “Jajuk is a collaborative project in the pure GNU spirit. Our point of view is that a FLOSS project should ideally be self-living thing independent of the current team.”
The project employs a host of popular open source tools to develop and manage the software. Version 1.8.4 was released last week, and the team is currently testing the upcoming 1.9 release, whose highlights include lyrics storage, a new notification system, and a lot of code refactoring and memory optimization. Florat says, “Jajuk is pretty stable now; future releases will probably include many new medium-sized features.” The project makes new releases about every six months.
If you’d like to help code or test Jajuk, the project can use you. “We also need money,” Florat says. “People can help by donating to support our current infrastructure.”