[HN Gopher] DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player
___________________________________________________________________
DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player
Author : theden
Score : 107 points
Date : 2025-02-12 12:58 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (deadbeef.sourceforge.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (deadbeef.sourceforge.io)
| scblock wrote:
| Some people I know love it but it just doesn't work for me in the
| way I use a music player. It's similar to foobar2000 in some ways
| which depending on your preferences can be good or bad.
|
| And the name is terrible.
|
| Strawberry is better for me but still kind of janky. Quod Libet
| and Rythmbox would seem closer to my ideal interface-wise, but
| scored massive own goals they seemingly will never recover from.
| How in 2025 music players refuse to (not can't, refuse to) get
| "Album Artist" right blows my mind.
|
| Since I subscribe to Plex I find I'm using Plexamp more than
| anything else, but that's not really open source.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| I really miss Foobar2000 on Linux (I've tried it a few times
| with Wine, and was never impressed vs. running it natively on
| Windows), so this looks like it might be just up my alley -
| especially since it has custom tag support.
| throwawee wrote:
| > (I've tried it a few times with Wine, and was never
| impressed vs. running it natively on Windows)
|
| Really? I noticed it's slower to start up but other than that
| it seems the same. I use it pretty regularly because foobar
| components handle formats the others can't.
|
| Other than that, I'd say Audacious is the closest Linux
| analogue to foobar2000. My one big gripe was freezing up for
| a bit when a stream cuts out (blocking socket?) but they
| fixed that.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Last time I tried it (quite long ago), I recall having some
| audio issues. Maybe I should try again... that was back
| when my old audio interface (that only ever worked on XP,
| since they never released production-grade drivers for
| Win7) finally died.
| Ennea wrote:
| Give it another try. I switched to Linux in 2022 and have
| been using fb2k via Wine all this time, and it runs
| perfectly.
| dsp_person wrote:
| Still using wine+foobar2000 as my music player here. The only
| issue I can think of is sometimes when when turning my
| screens off and back on, the UI might be glitched and need a
| restart.
| liotier wrote:
| > Strawberry is better for me but still kind of janky
|
| Strawberry isn't the most solid program (a few times a year,
| its search hiccups and gets stuck for a few seconds), but it
| carries the torch of Clementine's UX - which is my ideal music
| listening experience.
| Lammy wrote:
| Which itself carried the torch of Amarok 1.x's UX. No
| software rewrite, not even GNOME2-GNOME3, _ever_ hurt me as
| much as Amarok 1.4 - 2.0
|
| Compare Amarok 1.4:
| https://amarok.kde.org/files/amarok14/shot7.png
|
| To Amarok 2.0 alpha 1: https://web.archive.org/web/2011082019
| 0636/http://blog.lydia...
|
| It was so widely disappointing that the "Amarok 2.0 FAQ" had
| an entry for "IMO Amarok 2.0 looks terrible" even though
| that's not a question lol https://web.archive.org/web/2009020
| 8231357/http://amarok.kde...
|
| Luckily the Clementine project came along to deliver a
| straight port of Amazon 1.4 from Qt3 to Qt4 which was all 99%
| of people really wanted.
|
| *James Rolfe voice* What were they _thinking_ !?!?
| kstrauser wrote:
| Ouch. I loved Amarok 1.x back in the day. That was...
| something.
| liotier wrote:
| Right - how could I forget Amarok ? And I too was pushed to
| Clementine by Amarok 2.0
| lelandfe wrote:
| > How in 2025 music players refuse to (not can't, refuse to)
| get "Album Artist" right blows my mind
|
| Apple Music on macOS broke album artist (click the artist
| column a few times) a few releases ago and you now have to
| resort it on every launch. Maddening. They then added an
| explicit "sort by album artist" column which... does not work.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| >And the name is terrible.
|
| The name is just a piece of hacker lore from back in the day
|
| https://catb.org/jargon/html/D/DEADBEEF.html
| scblock wrote:
| I know what it is, that doesn't make it good.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's amazing how bad software developers are at naming
| their projects. At least this one is unique enough to be
| searchable, and could probably be SEO'ed above the computer
| lore (indeed, at least for me it's already #1 for
| "deadbeef" on the Google SERP).
|
| The worst are when they pick a generic English word for a
| project that has nothing to do with that word. I'm not
| going to name and shame, but there are so many examples of
| new project that get posted to HN monthly that have
| irrelevant and unsearchable names. We see things like "Show
| HN: Banana - A lightweight URL parsing library in Rust".
| WTF does URL parsing have to do with bananas? How do you
| expect that word to be uniquely searchable back to your
| project??
| thesnide wrote:
| Isn't it obvious ? Lightweight URL parsing library in
| Rust is just Bananas!
|
| But i totally get your point.
|
| I'm wondering that if some random gibberish might even be
| better to name a project nowadays. At least there would
| be less SEO collision.
| leviathant wrote:
| "Why hasn't Gimp found mainstream success?"
|
| "Adoption of our Ogg Vorbis format isn't where we hoped
| it to be"
|
| "Fork me on Git"
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Git is just a hobby project named after the author, like
| Linux.
|
| Yes, really:
|
| https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/git.wiki.kernel.org/in
| dex...
|
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html
| leviathant wrote:
| Neat! Both Linux and Git are examples of terrible product
| names.
| keyringlight wrote:
| The thing that gets me is application launchers, I'm fine
| with any clever and obscure name you pick for something
| that's intended to be behind the scenes as presumably
| there's going to be a certain amount of promotion or
| awareness inside whatever domain is involved. However if
| a launcher (or a repository/app store as an earlier step)
| just gives the clever name with no context to what it
| does rather than "CleverName - media tag information
| editor".
|
| It can go too far the other direction too, for example
| the generic names like Files, Phone, etc either preloaded
| on the device by the manufacturer (eg Samsung) or by
| Google, or some third party.
| card_zero wrote:
| Yes, my tablet has Contacts (icon: a blue figure on a
| white background), and then it has Contacts (icon: a
| white figure on a blue background), depending on which
| tech firm I want to spy on my social relationships.
| Lammy wrote:
| > It can go too far the other direction too, for example
| the generic names like Files
|
| The worst is when an application's display name is
| different from its actual name. Like on my MATE desktop
| it took me _years_ to fully internalize that "Files" is
| actually `caja` if I want to invoke it from a terminal.
| At least Nautilus was a type of shell lol
| card_zero wrote:
| Probably meaningful in another language. For instance it
| means "box" in Spanish, or in the language of the Pali
| Tipitaka it means "giving up".
| Lammy wrote:
| My experience is that the most overloaded software
| project name is "Apollo". I worked at one big company
| that had three different internal services by that name.
| I blame NASA for this one :v
| otikik wrote:
| Blame the ancient Greeks!
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I think that "Go" (the programming language) takes the
| crown.
|
| It is one of the most common words in the English
| language. It is also one of the most popular board games
| in the world, and it has nothing to do with it. It can
| mean plenty of other things, just look at the Wikipedia
| disambiguation page. It is enough of a problem that it is
| often called "golang" to make it more searchable.
|
| And ironically, it is made by Google.
| nayuki wrote:
| Agreed that Go is a terrible language name. Just go use
| Go to make a game of go while riding the GO train.
|
| C is pretty terrible too, being a popular and extremely
| influential language with a one-letter name.
| Lammy wrote:
| The best part is that it wasn't even an original name
| within the domain of programming languages:
| https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| It's because we don't care, labels are arbitrary and if
| your app is any good you can call it Chimpanzee Hot Dog
| Fart and people will still use it. Honestly, my personal
| stretch goal for my dev career is to invent an app that's
| so useful to corporate America as to be indispensable and
| then call it ThumbBum just to force people to reference
| it in professional contexts. "Jared I need you to get on
| ThumbBum right now. Lives are at stake."
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Music players are a great example of a type of app that at
| first brush seems simple and difficult to do badly, but in
| reality is littered with subtleties and bits that hinge on the
| preferences of the user, all of which can make or break the
| app.
|
| Makes it easy to understand why there's more players than can
| be counted but few worth using.
| wang_li wrote:
| That's because they all try to be more than they should be. I
| don't need or want a visualization option. I don't need or
| want an equalizer. I don't need or want a library. Those
| functions properly belong in other places or in the waste
| bin. My music library is on my filesystem and is sorted and
| arranged as I prefer. When I want to play an album I drag it
| over to MPC-HC. When I want to create a custom playlist, I
| open the playlist and drag songs over in the order I want. I
| don't need a psychedelic visualization, my use case for
| playing music on my pc is as background audio. The function
| of an equalizer is to make up for shortcomings in my speakers
| and belongs there. The media player should convert an encoded
| file into PCM data to be shoved out the DAC. Leave the file
| managing to my file manager. The sound shaping to my
| speakers. And the crap frequency domain visualizations in the
| trash.
| FpUser wrote:
| Perfect. The only thing left is to convince every other
| user to share your opinions. </s>
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I've of two minds on this. On one hand I agree, because the
| more functionality a music player has the more likely some
| of it will miss the mark, but on the other hand I find file
| managers as they currently exist are somewhat inadequate
| and incapable of fully replacing a library management
| system in a music player.
|
| Without going too far out into the weeds, lack of
| integration between filemanagers/filesystems and music
| players is the main problem. File managers aren't conducive
| to sorting by audio file metadata - even those that support
| it force the user to manually enable those columns in list
| mode and support is spotty across file formats, meaning the
| user has to fall back on "hacks" like modifying filenames
| to sort properly when sorting by name.
|
| Additionally, the browser-type design that's dominant in
| file managers doesn't lend to versatile use with other
| programs.
|
| This is one area where I think BeOS had the right idea.
| There, audio metadata was accessible by way of the
| filesystem which made it easy to access by applications and
| meant that the file manager more robustly supported sorting
| by that metadata. Additionally, the file manager was
| similar to that of Classic Mac OS where windows were dead
| simple and each represented a single folder, which made it
| easy to use a file manager window as a playlist window.
| vunderba wrote:
| None of this is universal.
|
| Putting the equalizer upstream at the speaker level means
| that all of your audio is affected by it. And yet there are
| many times where I am playing certain types of music, such
| as classical or tracker impulse chiptune that needs some
| adjustments - i'd much rather be able to adjust it at the
| playlist and/or player level.
|
| The advantage of a music player that builds a library from
| a set of folders is that it's infinitely faster to be able
| to do fuzzy searches particularly around metadata such as
| Idv3 tags.
|
| Etc. etc.
| ragazzina wrote:
| >My music library is on my filesystem and is sorted and
| arranged as I prefer.
|
| How do you manage albums that could be classified as two or
| more genres?
| fleshgolem wrote:
| I have tried A LOT of different music players over the years on
| Linux and the amount of ones that do not offer a single easy
| way to find a given album by a given artist is truly maddening.
|
| I have recently landed on Tauon which has a pretty particular
| UI that is pretty unlike most others, but after some getting
| used to worked well for me. Audacious is mostly fine as well,
| but at some point I did not want to use it anymore because it
| would just stop responding to MPRIS events too often
|
| For remote playing I have been really enamoured with Navidrome
| (in combination with Symfonium) lately. It's not super pretty,
| but it really has the best organization of albums I have seen
| so far and I kinda just dont use it for local files, because I
| dont want to do everything in the browser...
| ruuda wrote:
| Quod Libet handles album artists properly with the right
| sorting options? (And also it's one of the few that supports
| original release date, another seemingly essential feature that
| few players support.)
|
| In Musium (https://docs.ruuda.nl/musium/) I also handle
| collaboration albums that have multiple album artists, based on
| Musicbrainz album artist id.
| scblock wrote:
| If they changed something in the last year, maybe. But last
| time I dug into this in detail they screwed it up out of the
| box, specifically by refusing to use the same mp3 ID3 tag
| that most other software including Picard uses. So for FLACs
| it worked, but for MP3s it did not, until I went in and
| edited the code.
|
| At the time, the developers claimed changing it to work as
| people would expect it to would break existing user workflows
| and so they wouldn't do it.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| DeaDBeef isn't my primary player, but it does have some
| interesting capabilities that I use it for from time to time such
| as the ability to list chaptered AAC files as separate tracks
| (making it easier to navigate them).
|
| The way it supports alternative UIs by way of its plugin system
| is interesting too. It's neat to have a native GTK UI under a
| GNOME desktop, native Qt UI under KDE, and native AppKit UI under
| macOS with the same program.
| riidom wrote:
| Tried a lot of music players so far. Currently Deadbeef is my
| default one, despite two things I don't like:
|
| a) The search could be a bit more fuzzy (search "ade" and you
| won't find "ade")
|
| b) importing a directory takes ages; what takes me 5-7 minutes is
| done by Quod Libet in <10 seconds.
|
| Otherwise, love it!
| ge96 wrote:
| It's funny how a UI can look old. This looks like what Python
| Tkinter would spit out. Anyway at least for me software like this
| is more tangible nowadays (I could make it) though I'm not much
| of a music person (programming related to audio).
|
| I also used to have mp3s but not anymore, with Spotify,
| SoundCloud, BandCamp or YouTube with UBO.
| bux93 wrote:
| Yes, the clean look of a 'traditional' GUI is somehow
| refreshing now we're surrounded with dark patterns and
| inconsistent style over substance.
| encom wrote:
| Reimplementing foobar2000 in Electron is sort of a running
| joke on the #foobar2000 IRC channel.
| jchw wrote:
| Although I don't use DeaDBeeF as my primary music player anymore,
| back when I did, I wrote a plugin for using VgmStream with
| DeaDBeeF around 10 years ago, so I could more easily listen to
| video game soundtracks directly from the game files. For whatever
| reason, I have continued to maintain said plugin despite that I
| only use DeaDBeeF to test updates to it.
|
| It's not on the plugins list because I haven't bothered trying to
| get it there. I don't think that list existed when I wrote this.
| I approached the author about upstreaming it instead, thinking it
| would be a good compliment to the builtin Game_Music_Emu plugin
| for emulating various old video game and computer audio chips.
| They seemed a bit upset that people didn't want to maintain
| external plugins, but actually I didn't really mind doing so.
| Maybe I should look into getting it on that list some day.
|
| Either way, if streamed video game music formats are up your
| alley and you like DeaDBeeF, then shameless plug:
| https://github.com/jchv/deadbeef-vgmstream
| Avshalom wrote:
| DeaDBeeF has been my goto for a while now because it's the only
| linux music player with the _extremely specific_ feature I used
| in winamp:
|
| enqueue is an arbitrary list so you can have a playlist, leave it
| in order and/but/then play a song multiple times in a row.
| everyone else it's a toggle so you enqueue a song and then
| enqueue again and it removes it; if you want to listen to a song
| multiple times before moving on you have to add it to the actual
| playlist multiple times and I do not want to do that.
|
| literally the only important feature to me in a music player.
| riidom wrote:
| Qmmp does that too! It's (with deadbeef the primary) my
| secondary player, where I have a short playlist with songs that
| are meant to loop an indefinite amount of times.
| cess11 wrote:
| DB is quite nice. Don't know if it still supports it but back in
| 2017-2019 it was possible to use terminal commands to control
| playback, similar to what one might use a more complex tool like
| mpd for, which I wrapped in Picolisp to be able to easily change
| the music without leaving the REPL and then hooked it up to a
| socket for remote control over the LAN.
| cullumsmith wrote:
| If you are a KDE user, I highly recommend fooyin, which is
| essentially a Qt6 clone of Foobar2000:
|
| https://www.fooyin.org/
| worble wrote:
| I've been using strawberry since moving to linux since there
| was no good foobar2000 replacement but I just discovered fooyin
| these past couple of days and this is so convincingly close
| that I can pretend it's just foobar2000.
|
| That's not to throw any shade on strawberry, it's also
| incredibly good, but foobar2000 will always have it's claws in
| me.
| encom wrote:
| foobar2000 actually runs very well in Wine.
| lousken wrote:
| couple years ago, i did try but after hours of attempts, i
| just couldn't install working version of Eole-foobar-theme,
| is it possible to run these days?
| mikae1 wrote:
| Another vote for fooyin! A foobar2000 like player that feels
| right at home in Plasma is a dream come true.
| lousken wrote:
| thank you! i thought i had to use elisa for the rest of my time
| it's still missing some foobar stuff but i like it
| DecoySalamander wrote:
| The killer feature that made me switch to DeaDBeeF was the
| replaygain scanner that works out of the box. I just wish it
| would integrate better with the KDE environment.
| killerstorm wrote:
| I know DeaDBeeF's lead dev (O. Yakovenko) from a game dev forum I
| frequented ~20 years ago. IIRC I regarded him as one of most
| competent people on said forum: he was an actual professional
| game dev, perhaps capable implementing a whole game from scratch,
| whereas most ppl on the forum were amateurs.
| the4anoni wrote:
| Naah, foobar2000 FTW!
| foresto wrote:
| > runs on GNU/Linux distributions, macOS, Windows, *BSD,
| OpenSolaris, and other UNIX-like systems.
|
| > Each platform's native UI toolkit is employed to deliver the
| best experience
|
| > GTK2, GTK3, ALSA and PulseAudio on Unix systems
|
| If the author is here, please understand that there is no
| "native" UI toolkit for Linux or BSD. These platforms have
| several widely-used desktop environments, some of which use the
| Qt toolkit instead of Gtk.
|
| For what it's worth, Qt is an excellent cross-platform toolkit,
| and does a far better job than Gtk at looking and feeling native
| across all the major desktop environments and operating systems.
| You might consider it instead of Gtk for future work.
| idoubtit wrote:
| > If the author is here, please understand that there is no
| "native" UI toolkit for Linux or BSD.
|
| You're wrong. When a library is _native_ to some system, it
| does not mean that it is always shipped with the system. It
| means that it runs directly, without an interpretation layer in
| the runtime.
|
| So GTK3 is native to Linux/Xorg. The desktop environment is
| irrelevant, and may not be based on GTK3.
| foresto wrote:
| The phrase "Each platform's native UI toolkit" suggests that
| each platform has one specific native toolkit. That
| misconception is what I was addressing.
|
| To put it in practical context, apps built with Gtk generally
| stand out like sore thumbs on Qt-based desktops like KDE
| Plasma, both in the way they look and in the way their
| widgets respond to input. This rather undermines the app's
| claim "to deliver the best experience" with its choice of UI
| toolkit.
|
| But if you like, go ahead and believe that I'm wrong instead
| of trying to understand.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Any other fans of Foobar2000? https://www.foobar2000.org/
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Whoever is taking the screenshots has good taste in music.
| jerhewet wrote:
| MusicBee https://www.getmusicbee.com/
|
| Very (very) longtime user, with just under 10K albums I can
| peruse. Took me a while to tweak everything in the UI to my
| tastes, but now I can't imagine using anything else to listen to
| streaming music.
|
| And yes, I really do have that many albums. Most of them are LP's
| and CD's, the rest are from places like Bandcamp
| (https://bandcamp.com/jerhewet).
| luixmg wrote:
| If I have to choose a music player I would go with aimp.
| fph wrote:
| It feels like music players are becoming a thing for old geezers,
| like everything that requires you to have your data on a local
| disk. The 'modern' approach is just streaming everything off the
| net, no local storage required.
|
| (I'm writing this as a disapproving old geezer, just in case it
| wasn't clear.)
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| Plexamp is a good player for your local files (personal server)
| that you can stream.
| yapyap wrote:
| eh, for the masses yes but it depends on what people u surround
| urself with.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| There's a large and growing number of music players for
| streaming from your own server. You get the best of both worlds
| by owning your music and having it accessible anywhere.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| They are all so poorly written though.
|
| None of the OSS media players come even remotely close to the
| UX of Spotify, and that's speaking as someone who has paid
| way too much for Roon because it's at least 80% of the way
| there.
| ekianjo wrote:
| You don't need to always listen to new pieces of music to enjoy
| music. Once you realize that you can focus on owning the stuff
| you like and listen to that most of the time
| plywoodShadow wrote:
| I don't need music player on my pc, because mpv can be used for
| playing music. It also supports zip archives, so albums from
| bandcamp can be played without unpacking
| justaj wrote:
| I do too, but I found that it doesn't quite work well with
| stuff like .cue files the way it works with individual files.
|
| With individual files I can at least (in console for example)
| `cycle-values keep-open always`, which makes mpv not continue
| to the next file after finishing the current file, however, it
| doesn't work when a chapter of a .cue file has finished, thus
| continuing on.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I don't subscribe to the FOSS purism you often see in Linux
| projects.
|
| But there's something refreshing about seeing a tool that just
| gets more useful over time. Contrast that with closed-source
| software, whose features are driven by OKRs and might vanish if a
| new PM decides they aren't promotion-worthy or important to the
| next billion users.
|
| I do wonder about hygiene and vision on such projects. On the one
| hand, seeing what happens when dozens of people over the decades
| have all written players for their own weird pet format is cool.
| On the other, I imagine a lot of that falls out of maintenance if
| the guy who wrote one looses interest, or if the project gets
| ported to a platform he doesn't care about.
|
| I also expect that the Linuxisms of "everything is a setting" and
| "control density over visual appeal" are natural consequences if
| nobody is in charge of setting a vision.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| Other fun music players:
|
| - https://foobar2000.org
|
| - https://volumio.org
|
| - http://rhythmbox.org
|
| - https://amarok.kde.org
|
| - https://cmus.github.io
|
| - https://museeks.io
|
| - https://fooyin.org
|
| - https://audacious-media-player.org
|
| - https://www.clementine-player.org
| scns wrote:
| https://strawberrymusicplayer.org/
| scns wrote:
| It's the successor of Clementine.
| nataliste wrote:
| * xXx_nataliste420_xXx is now playing In the End by Linkin Park
| [3:36] [Playing] [played 467 times] [Nu-Metal]
| dingdingdang wrote:
| Can vouch for Audacious, clean straight-forward UI and neat
| plugin functionality if needed (along with equaliser
| functionality which is what originally got me on board). Bit of
| a heavy feel from QT backend though so I might try out
| DeaDBeeF..!
| internet101010 wrote:
| At this point syncing playlists across devices is my main
| requirement for a music library player.
|
| I still have Spotify but I mostly use Plexamp now and have pretty
| much phased out musikcube. I still have a musikcubed service
| container pushing a large playlist on repeat/shuffle to a FM
| transmitter though.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| On desktop, I am using audacious with winamp skin, but I haven't
| found a music player on android managing properly my cue
| files...A bit annoying.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| VLC https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc
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(page generated 2025-02-12 23:01 UTC)