FAQ

What platforms is Tauon for?

Tauon is primarily designed for the Linux desktop. Builds also exist for Windows and macOS.

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What is Tauon?

Tauon is a desktop music player application that plays your own music files. Its oriented around playlists and works best with local audio files, but also can work with a remote server such as Jellyfin. Tauon has a simple and streamlined dark themed interface with a nice big album art display, a gallery view and a cool milkdrop/projectm powered visualiser (coming soon).

Its not just looks though, Tauon also has many features under the hood designed for semi-power users.

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Is Tauon free?

Tauon is a free and open source project licensed under the GPLv3. Designed for the sake of music. No ads, no tracking, no paywalls, no bullshit. (Although I say that, if you find yourself using Tauon a lot, I would love it if you would support me on Patreon or GitHub Sponsors).

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Does Tauon organise my music for me?

Not exactly. Basically you import all your music into one playlist. From there you can search and create filtered and sorted playlists.

Tauon works best if your music library is structured and properly tagged. At minimum every album should be in its own folder.

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Where do I get music from?

There are many sources for music. Bandcamp is a great place for indie and alternative music both paid and free.

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What audio engine does this app use?

It uses its own built-in audio processor.

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Can this application handle large music collections?

Tauon is intended to work well with medium to large music libraries. However, if you have a huge number of tracks, you may notice longer load times and degraded UI performance in some elements such as search.

There’s no hard limit to the number of tracks you can import, but to give a ballpark number, it should handle at least up to ~50k tracks comfortably.

Technical FAQs

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What toolkit is this program using?

It’s using a custom GPU-accelerated UI written in Python, built upon SDL3.

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Can I load music from network folders?

On Linux, if you can mount the folder, you can access it like any other filesystem. Network folders aren’t supported on Windows.

This isn’t necessarily the ideal way of doing this, however. It might be better to run a music network server designed specifically for music such as Jellyfin.

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Are HiDPI displays supported?

By default, Tauon will try to detect an appropriate UI scale automatically.

You can manually set the scaling Tauon uses by going MENU > Settings... > Window and adjusting the slider.

Tip

If album art tends to look too small, consider enabling the setting Zoom album art to fit under Settings... > View.

If text in the tracklist seems vertically off-centre, consider tweaking the setting Baseline offset under Settings... > Tracklist to whatever looks visually best to you.

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Is high-res 24bit audio supported?

Lossess codec support is as follows:

Codec	Preserve high resolution?	Preserve sample rate?
FLAC, WavPack	Yes, 24bit supported	Yes with “Avoid Resampling” on
WAV, ALAC, APE, TTA	Downscaled to 16bit	No, may use resampling

Avoiding resampling on Linux

To get sample rates forwarded to your DAC, enable the setting “Avoid Resampling” in Tauon under MENU > Settings > Audio. You will also need to enable dynamic samplerates in your Pipewire configuration, see here on how to do that.

The downside of enabling Avoid Resampling is that fades will no longer occur between tracks of differing sample rates

Troubleshooting FAQs

My music isn’t detected any more! (Its in /run or /mnt and I’m using Flatpak)

Drag and drops to Flatpak applications are only transient, to make them permanent you need to grant file permissions.

You can use the app Flatseal to do this.

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I’m using Flatpak with NVIDIA and the window just shows an empty border on launch

Try run flatpak update.

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I tried installing/updating the Flatpak but it gives error “Aborted due to failure…”

Try run: sudo flatpak repair && flatpak repair --user && flatpak update

I added new items to my home music folder, but they didn’t then immediately show up in Tauon, why?

Tauon doesn’t have background scanning. You need to either manually import items, or use the “Rescan Folders” function from a playlist tab context menu.

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Some of my albums don’t have album art!

It should be detected if you have them. If you don’t have thee it’s up to you to manage your library and provide them. For convenience, while playing a particular album you can right click the album art viewport in the right side panel and select “Quick fetch cover art”.

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Some of the thumbnails in the gallery aren’t showing the correct cover image, how to I change it?

Right click the thumbnail, choose “Image…”, then choose “Next”.