What Customization and Extras Does Tauon Offer?

Tauon offers four main extras beyond basic playback: a widget-based custom layout system with ready-made views, MilkDrop visualiser presets powered by projectM, time-synced lyrics you can show, fetch and write, and a tag editor with batch edits plus MusicBrainz lookup by audio fingerprint. All four are listed on the official site (tauonmusicbox.rocks) as core features of the player, which runs on Linux, Windows and macOS under GPLv3. They matter most if you keep a local library and want the player window and metadata to work the way you do, rather than accepting a fixed interface.

Custom layouts: build the window or pick a view

Tauon's layout system is the headline customization feature. The site describes it as building the window from widgets, or picking a ready-made view. In practice that means two paths:

• Ready-made views — start from a preset arrangement if you don't want to assemble anything.
• Widget-built layouts — compose the window yourself from individual widgets, so panels and controls match how you browse and play.

The site also pairs this with a gallery view: your albums appear as a grid of cover art next to the playlist. If cover-based browsing is central to how you find music, a layout that keeps the gallery and playlist side by side is the obvious starting point.

When this fits: you dislike players with one fixed pane structure and want the library, playlist and album art arranged to your taste. When it doesn't: if you never rearrange your player window, presets alone will cover you and the widget system adds little.

MilkDrop visualiser via projectM

Tauon includes the classic MilkDrop visualiser presets, powered by projectM. This is the well-known reactive visualiser style rather than a generic spectrum display, so if you liked MilkDrop in earlier players, the presets should feel familiar.

Practical note: visualisers are GPU-driven and run alongside playback. The site doesn't publish hardware requirements, so treat performance on older machines as something to check yourself — enable the visualiser and watch for dropped frames or audio stutter during normal use.

Time-synced lyrics: show, fetch, write

Lyrics in Tauon are time-synced, and the site lists three actions: show, fetch and write.

• Show — display synced lyrics while a track plays.
• Fetch — retrieve lyrics for tracks that don't have them yet.
• Write — save lyrics yourself, so a track you've synced stays that way in your library.

This is a library feature, not a streaming one: lyrics attach to the files you own. The most useful workflow is to fetch in bulk for albums you play often, then write corrections where the fetched timing drifts. The site doesn't specify which lyrics source the fetch uses, so verify coverage on your own collection before relying on it for niche or non-English material.

Tag editor with batch edits and fingerprint lookup

The tag editor supports batch edits and MusicBrainz lookup by audio fingerprint. That combination targets a common problem: a large local library with inconsistent or missing metadata.

• Batch edits — change a tag across many files at once instead of one by one.
• Fingerprint lookup — identify a track from its audio itself and look it up on MusicBrainz, which helps when filenames and existing tags are wrong or absent.

Example task: you rip a stack of CDs and the tracks land with generic names. Select them, run a fingerprint lookup to match them against MusicBrainz, then apply batch edits for album and artist fields across the set. The site doesn't detail how edits are confirmed or whether they write directly to files, so test on a small batch first and keep a backup of your library before bulk changes.

How the extras fit together

These sit on top of a playlist-first library: import once, then slice it with search, folders and smart playlists. The site also notes lossless and gapless playback across FLAC, Opus, WavPack, APE, DSD and CUE sheets, plus no ads, no tracking and no account. If your priority is a polished out-of-the-box interface, the customization depth here may be more than you need; if you want to shape the player around a curated local collection, these are the features to evaluate first.