You're deep in code. Music plays somewhere: Spotify, or one of the YouTube tabs you forgot about. A great song comes on. Who is it? Which tab? Or an ad blasts at full volume and you just want it quiet, now. You leave the editor, hunt through windows, and the flow is gone.
GNOME's media control sees a whole browser as one player. Three YouTube tabs, one row. To pause the right one, you still have to find the right tab.
So I built Earful, a GNOME Shell extension.
What it does
- "Who sings this?" When the track changes, a small card shows the cover, title and artist, then fades away.
- Every tab is its own player. Three YouTube tabs, three rows, each with play, pause, next and volume. Click one and you land on that exact tab.
- One click, every player. Spotify, YouTube, Twitch, VLC, mpv, podcasts: one list in the top bar, with a volume slider for each.
Make it yours
A spinning vinyl, a cassette, a retro hi-fi equalizer, a sound wave, or a note in the retro road. In the colors of each album cover, or one you pick.
It stays out of your way
- Focus mode: Super + Shift + M silences every popup.
- No popups over fullscreen games or in Do Not Disturb.
- Optional: start a video and your music pauses by itself.
How it works
Linux players already share what they play through MPRIS, a standard D-Bus interface. Earful listens to it, so Spotify, VLC and browsers show up on their own.
Browsers are the tricky part: they report one player for all tabs. So a small browser add-on watches each tab's audio and video, and a native messaging helper turns every tab into its own MPRIS player. Works in Chrome, Chromium, Brave, Edge and Firefox. Earful sets the helper up by itself.
No tracking, no accounts. Nothing leaves your computer.
Try it
GNOME 46 to 51. One command, then restart:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NGdev2/earful/main/install.sh | sh If it saves you a few Alt+Tabs, a ⭐ on GitHub would make my day, and it helps others find it. Ideas and bug reports are very welcome.
