Sunamu: Display the lyrics of the music currently playing on the Dekstop under Linux

Be a feast for the eyes musical gadget (or controller).

That’s Sunamu’s sole focus, and he does his job pretty well.

Sunamu is an intriguing tool. It’s not a music player but lets you view the music you’re playing and control it.

I’m not a fan of having a floating widget on my main workspace, but Sunamu’s minimal yet elegant approach changed my mind!

So I will walk you through its features, installation, configuration settings, and my experience with it.

Sunamu: an open source music controller

As you can see in the screenshot above, this looks like a really good way to display music playing, complete with lyrics, while still having basic controls.

You can play/pause, skip to next/previous track, shuffle and loop.

Sunamu supports a wide range of audio platforms including Spotify. It also detects music from your local collection, supporting some of the best music players available for Linux.

Moreover, it supports Windows. So if you’re streaming something through the Microsoft Edge browser on Windows, it should work fine.

You can check the compatibility list on its GitHub page to learn more about supported players and browsers.

Luckily, you don’t have to be limited by what it offers by default. It provides an easy way to modify the configuration file (read more on its GitHub page). This allows beginners to change some settings and have fun.

I will mention some tips on this in the last section of this article.

Features of Sunamu

Sunamu comes with a set of promising features, and some of them are:

• Detects and displays the currently playing song.
• Grab the album cover color schemes and use the same color palette for better visuals.
• Customizable thanks to its configuration file.
• Integrates well with Discord.
• Consumes minimal system resources.

Install Sunamu on Linux

It provides AppImage, deb and rpm packages for easy installation on various Linux distributions. I used AppImage for testing, and it worked like a charm.

You may also benefit from our guide on how to use AppImage or install deb packages and rpm packages, if you are new to Linux.

Interestingly, Sunamu is one of the few open-source music tools that provides direct support for ARM-based machines.

Visit their GitHub releases page to download packages or build from source.

Let me show you a quick installation method for a Debian-based distribution via the terminal. Just follow the instructions given and you will be good to go:

First, let’s download the .deb package using the wget command as follows:

wget https://github.com/NyaomiDEV/Sunamu/releases/download/v2.0.0/sunamu_2.0.0_amd64.deb

Once you are done downloading the package, use the given command for installation:

sudo dpkg -i sunamu_2.0.0_amd64.deb

Tip: modify the configuration file

By default, Sunamu does not retrieve the colors of the album cover but displays the lyrics of each song. And like many others, I like to avoid reading the lyrics.

The Sunamu configuration file is usually located at ~/.config/sunamu/config.json5.

To open the Sunamu configuration file, type the given command:

nano ~/.config/sunamu/config.json5

Make changes in the electronics section as shown below (to enable colors and disable lyrics):

electron: {
      type: 'electron',
      widgetMode: true,
      colors: true,
      font: '',
      theme: 'default',
      showLyrics: false,
    }

This is what the final configuration file should look like:

Final Thoughts

Unless you’re someone who avoids electron-based apps, Sunamu is a good enough app to enhance your music experience on Linux. After Amberol, this is the second music related app that I have liked recently.

If you try it, don’t forget to share your experience in the comment section.