[HN Gopher] The state of Linux music players in 2026
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The state of Linux music players in 2026
Author : signa11
Score : 125 points
Date : 2026-01-27 07:26 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (crescentro.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (crescentro.se)
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| Cool. I didn't know there was a fork of clementine. I hope it
| fixes a few bugs I have. It's clearly my favorite player ever.
| Thanks.
| maqp wrote:
| Something that wasn't mentioned in the article - if you're coming
| from Windows and using Foobar2000, you'll want DeadBeeF
| https://deadbeef.sourceforge.io/
| apopapo wrote:
| All these players will never dethrone DeadBeeF's interface.
| Foobar2000 simply has the perfect layout - and it's
| customizable.
| rederik wrote:
| I ended up running foobar2000 in Wine. I had some problems
| during setup, but it runs fine now.
| Avshalom wrote:
| I'll throw out Fooyin for QT
| slyfox125 wrote:
| Fooyin is great. For those spoiles by foobar2000, there are
| no alternatives.
| maqp wrote:
| thanks I'll have to test this out!
| jszymborski wrote:
| Also, Foobar2000 works just fine over WINE, FYI.
| mycall wrote:
| Do Foobar2000 Components work with WINE? I try installing
| components on MacOS and they say Nope, only Windows is
| supported for this plugin. My workaround is to use Ableton
| Live and Bluehole (for audio routing) but it is CPU
| expensive.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I'm a little surprised that anyone still plays music on their
| computer. Surely now we've moved into the era where we all have
| dedicated devices for that. Your phone for 99.9% of people, I'd
| imagine. And for the audiophiles there's a bunch of very high
| quality DAPs to pick from.
| ggm wrote:
| Plex. Connected to a digital audio input. Or, chromecast
| compatible audio equipment. Tidal does this too.
| nchagnet wrote:
| I can see why, when I work/focus, I like to use my computer
| instead of my phone because that's where my headphones are
| connected (easy switch for meetings, etc.) and I generally like
| to be nice to my phone battery.
| Aldipower wrote:
| Yes, I am surprised too. I moved back to MC and vinyl years
| ago.
| JodieBenitez wrote:
| My own software on a raspberrypi, a bluetooth receiver on my
| yamaha amp and my phone between the two. Simple setup, a joy to
| use.
| nakedneuron wrote:
| Can you elaborate what app (?) you use on your phone?
| JodieBenitez wrote:
| I made my own web app using boring technology(1). It's not
| available anywhere since it's completely tailored to my own
| needs so probably not useful to anyone else. Also some
| parts of the code need cleanup and there is no
| documentation.
|
| (1) SQLite/Django/Bootstrap5/Unpoly app. SQLite is used for
| all the data and the full text search. Huey is used for
| background tasks. Tinytags gets metadata from audio files.
| LastFM API provides similar artists functionality. YT-DLP
| is used to fetch music that is not easy (for me) to get (no
| bandcamp, only on streaming, old stuff not easy to
| find...). Bootstrap provides a clean look and the usual
| responsive stuff. Dropbox API is used to maintain a copy of
| the music files in my dropbox account. The app currently
| handles a collection of 70k files and runs on a raspberrypi
| behind the caddy web server.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Well, I play music on my computer when I'm working on my
| computer. Nicer interface and I don't have to swap headphones
| or whatever when going to a video meeting.
| puika wrote:
| How is Quod Libet not here? Cross platform and its plugin system
| should be enough reason on its own
|
| https://github.com/quodlibet/quodlibet
| sudoaptinstall wrote:
| I popped in to see if it made it.
|
| I've been using it for ages. It's awesome. I think the only
| issue I've ever had with it is some Bluetooth weirdness.
| Honestly, the reason I keep using it is the ability to use
| custom genres from the metadata as search windows. I have a
| bunch of custom genres (like performer which removes all the
| ft. xyz nonsense in artist listings) that I always find hard to
| access easily on most other players.
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but I still like the plainness of MPD +
| ncmpcpp.
| kataklasm wrote:
| Same here! But I recently switched from ncmpcpp to rmpc, which
| is a much more modern client! A lot more (easily) customizable
| compared to ncmpcpp as well.
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| Thanks, gotta check that out!
| edhelas wrote:
| MyMPD is an awesome web client for MPD
| https://github.com/jcorporation/myMPD
|
| I added it on my RPi and it offers a really nice a home
| "Spotify" :)
| hmm37 wrote:
| CMUS for me, and for internet radio pyradio.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| I hated it at first, but gave up and nowadays I feel it's good
| enough not to change anything. Being Client/Server made it
| somewhat cool, but it's not cool enough, I want sharded
| libraries to feel like one (like have my phone pretend it has
| music only my desktop has and stream/sync seamlessly)
| JodieBenitez wrote:
| > You might say that owning is more expensive than renting, even
| with all the price increases. Sure. But I've paid for Spotify for
| ten years, from 2014 to 2024, and that's a solid 1200EUR with the
| old pricing. At the end, I had nothing to show for it. My
| carefully curated "library" was not mine - it was held hostage by
| a company that can up the prices at any point.
|
| 10 years to realize it ? What took so long ?
| Aldipower wrote:
| So, why do they look so clumsy all together? I am using Audacity
| with the XMMS theme. That's what I am used to.
| awesomegoat_com wrote:
| This reminds me the blog one would write around 2006. Not the
| text content, but the pixelated font and pictures of winamp wibe
| like that.
|
| Myself, I am rather happily using mplayer - without any gui.
| Initially it was practicality of not leaking memory - like many
| gtk+ apps would do. Now, it is pure utility.
| pryncevv wrote:
| The blog one would write around 2006 is what we define as the
| 'alivenet'; and it's still there - https://vvesh.de
| boje wrote:
| Shoutouts to Audacious
|
| https://audacious-media-player.org/
| downsplat wrote:
| Been flying with Audacious and deadbeef for ages. Minimalistic
| but quick and effective.
| kykat wrote:
| Always used audacious, does everything I need. Is fast, native
| (gtk or Qt), and you can save playlists.
|
| On the music management side of things, I always feel like
| files and folders are the way to go.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| TBH the only thing I care for (except maybe for playlist
| management) is gapless playback. There's no word about it, but I
| constantly find out that the new players do not really care about
| the gap, while the music I am listening to is always ripped from
| my personal CDs and they mostly have music continuing on two or
| more tracks. Why nobody cares about it?
|
| Do you know this feeling when you get towards the High Hopes on
| The Division Bell and there's this ugly crack in between tracks?
| onli wrote:
| My guess is not everyone is annoyed by that, or knows about the
| option. It was a nice surprise of qmmp, it switches to the next
| song without an extra pause.
|
| I use it with a winamp skin from
| https://archive.org/details/winampskins, to add to the options.
| Not sure about streaming support, I use it with local files.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > My guess is not everyone is annoyed by that, or knows about
| the option.
|
| It depends on the genre, I'd guess. For metal, there's rarely
| continuous songs, mainly sometimes intro -> 1st proper song.
| onli wrote:
| Right. Though one of this intro -> 1st song transitions
| from a metal album (Gamma Ray, No World order) immediately
| pops into my head when thinking of examples where the gap
| was annoying.
|
| But Pink Floyds Dark Side of the Moon would be be
| completely destroyed by the breaks.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| maybe not metal but the whole Offspring - Americana has
| this thing
| Semaphor wrote:
| It also happens for metal. I said "rare" ;) One might not
| encounter it.
| internet_points wrote:
| There is a music player called Gapless that might help :)
| https://github.com/neithern/g4music
|
| Also https://github.com/vicrodh/qbz for Qobuz supports gapless
| playback
| squigz wrote:
| No mention of ncmpcpp?! Pshaw.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| For most of my music listening needs, I self-host SwingMusic and
| keep it pinned in Firefox. Occasionally I'll open the music files
| directly with MPV or VLC.
|
| The automatic lyrics fetching and playback sync in SwingMusic is
| pretty nice. My only complaint is that it doesn't let me do full-
| collection shuffle. Ideally it would also allow me to do
| something like "full collection shuffle but only of songs that I
| have never heard". Sometimes I'll pick up an album because it
| seems interesting but things happen and I forget that I added it
| and it might languish without listening to it for months or
| years.
|
| I'm waiting a bit for this to mature before I try it out, but
| I've seen that there's a few ongoing projects to analyze your
| full music collection to do feature extraction and generate smart
| playlists using AI tools. I'm not sure if it'll pan out but it
| seems like a fun tool for exploring large music collections and
| possibly making unexpected connections.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| I'm very happy that I mostly listen to electronic music (house &
| techno in its various forms). The predominant way to listen to
| that is via DJ mixes and recorded Livesets. This field has always
| been ignored by the commercial streamers, and there is a culture
| of uploading sets to platforums such as youtube and soundcloud -
| where you can easily download (albeit youtube making things more
| difficult in recent years). Since a set is a minimum of 1hour,
| you don't care for song search, album art etc. You basically need
| 5-10 files to have music for weeks.
|
| I'm using audacious on macOS installed via homebrew - it has a
| winamp-like skin. That was peak audioplayer design.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Something I don't get is if you search Spotify for some classic
| mixes, like Sasha and Digweed's _Northern Exposure_ , for
| example, you'll find that someone has compiled a playlist of
| all/most/many of the individual tracks from the mix. But of
| course listening to the individual tracks is a completely
| different and much less enjoyable thing. I also don't get why
| people spend their time doing things like that on closed
| platforms.
|
| Most of my favourite mixes, like the _Global Underground_
| series aren 't on there at all. And that's just stuff that came
| out on CD. Some of the best mixes are things like Radio 1
| Essential Mixes or live events.
|
| I've also noticed some artists "redoing" their own tracks on
| Spotify. If you look for Chicane's _Behind the Sun_ on there
| you won 't even find the original, only a redone version that's
| nothing like the one you remember.
|
| So yeah, having a personal music collection is still very
| important.
| overfeed wrote:
| > Since a set is a minimum of 1hour, you don't care for song
| search, album art etc.
|
| I _do_ care for song search in sets; has the use of .cue files
| fallen out of fashion as a solution[1]? Amarok supported .cue
| files since forever, its descendants (Clementine, Strawberry)
| probably do too.
|
| 1. Insofar as you can handle hundreds/thousands of tracks in
| your library named `ID` because the song hadn't been titled at
| the time of upload (or uploader didn't know the title).
| antisol wrote:
| Yeah audacious is where it's at. I've never understood why
| anybody would want to use an audio player that doesn't look
| like winamp. I even use (a lightly modified version of) the
| original winamp 2 skin:
| https://skins.webamp.org/skin/5e4f10275dcb1fb211d4a8b4f1bda2...
|
| Honorable mention to qmmp, too.
| hofrogs wrote:
| Strawberry is a really good one.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I tried using Strawberry a couple years ago. It suffered from a
| bug where every so often, playback just stops.
|
| (Another bug was that the album art Strawberry displays is a
| severely downscaled, and then enlarged-with-obvious-pixelation,
| version of the art embedded in the file. It would be easier,
| and look better, to just display the embedded art.)
|
| Shortly after I reported this, they decided they wanted to turn
| into a paid service.
|
| https://forum.strawberrymusicplayer.org/topic/1848/pay-for-t...
|
| I was not left with a very positive impression.
| aarroyoc wrote:
| It is still GPL, it is still free software, the source code
| is there. Only the Windows and macOS binaries are behind a
| paywall, but you can build yourself the binaries, or use it
| on Linux. RedHat does this and is "an example of free
| software monetization", Strawberry does it "and it should no
| longer be called free software".
| komali2 wrote:
| > [regarding spotify] At the end, I had nothing to show for it.
| My carefully curated "library" was not mine
|
| Not just your library, but your listen history and your
| playlists. I was very annoyed that I had to pay a 3rd party
| company to export this data so that I could import it into
| listenbrainz and navidrome.
|
| Not to mention there's a song that Spotify removed from my
| "Liked" playlist that to this day I can't quite remember, though
| I can remember just enough of it to drive me mad:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/1hklstg/tomt...
|
| Anyway, I manage a homelab (read: a scrapbox ubuntu machine with
| 64TB of spinning disk attached) with 25,000 songs in it, and upon
| exiting my last position, spent my therapist-mandated "burnout
| recovery time" finally using `beet` to organize the damn thing. I
| still don't really understand beet, but now I have a semi-decent
| flow for abandoning Tidal: Find new released music on
| Listenbrainz, download it in Nicotine (filtering for >320). Idly
| browse a given user's other folders shared in Nicotine while
| waiting for downloads to see if they have anything else I want.
| Once done, `beet import /mnt/media/downloads/music2`, go through
| its flow, add anything to musicbrainz that isn't already in
| there, wipe the download directory when finished to clear out any
| cruft, and happily play it on Feishin on desktop (connected to my
| Navidrome instance).
|
| I'm still sorting the mobile version of this out a bit. "Tempus"
| on F-droid seems the best Subsonic client, however unfortunately
| "offlining" music on it doesn't expose those files to the Android
| system or other apps, so I can only play those files within
| Tempus itself. That's not such a big deal when I've got my IEMs
| plugged directly into the headphone jack on my phone (yeah that's
| right I found a phone in 2026 with a headphone jack: sony
| xperia), but when I have my usb DAC plugged in, I want to use
| "USB Audio Player PRO" to bypass the android audio stack, and
| that can only play audio files it can find in local directories,
| no subsonic compatibility (but it does have a Tidal
| integration...). So lately I've tried just downloading playlists
| and albums from the Navidrome web interface on my phone.
| zppln wrote:
| You can get your listen history? How?
| komali2 wrote:
| Ah right sorry, I believe I was able to export my Tidal
| listen history but not Spotify. I did export my Spotify (and
| Tidal) playlists though, using Soundiiz. I tried to bang out
| a quick console script but it was tedious and boring so I
| just dropped the cash.
| notachatbot123 wrote:
| Can't you GDPR request that data?
| komali2 wrote:
| I'm not in Europe, but, otherwise, that's a great idea.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I've made GDPR data requests before as an Australian. The
| companies just side with always complying with it rather
| than working out who is actually covered by the laws.
| pbmonster wrote:
| Sounds like you have a music discovery process in nicotine? Can
| you elaborate on how you find new things to listen to? Just my
| looking at what individual other users listen to?
|
| Music discovery is the one thing I cannot drop Spotify for. I
| want to make a playlist with 10 songs and then have an
| algorithm suggest 20 more - ideally songs I have never listened
| to before, or songs I haven't listened to in a long time.
|
| Spotify is mediocre at that task, but I just can't find a
| replacement at all...
| komali2 wrote:
| I scrobble from navidrome to listenbrainz.
|
| Then, logged in, I look here
| https://listenbrainz.org/explore/fresh-releases/ "for you"
| tab. Or here https://listenbrainz.org/explore/similar-users/
|
| Then, when downloading in nicotine, you can click a user to
| see all their shares, so I just scroll through what other
| kind of stuff they have, and download anything that strikes
| my fancy.
| hnthrow31 wrote:
| Switching from winslop to linux last year (thanks Satya) I did
| expect some teething issues. The reality was a bit different than
| what I imagined: fedora kde the OS is rock solid, but the
| software choices are a bit lacking. Just finding a good audio
| player can be a pain, and eventually I settled on some foobar
| clone fooyin, which while lacking built-in audio conversion
| mostly does what I want it to.
|
| MacOS however truly takes the cake. An OS that's great for
| creative softwate, working with images, video, audio and so on,
| and every single music player is something designed by aliens
| and/or buggy and/or missing some basic features. I went through
| ~five different players just to find one that has a waveform
| seekbar, eventually finding it in quodlibet, which while somewhat
| functional fits in the designed by aliens part. Baffling.
| darcien wrote:
| I also can recommend fooyin[0]. I really miss foobar2000 after
| switching away from Windows, and fooyin fills that hole in my
| heart.
|
| Technically fooyin also builds on macOS, but it's not
| officially supported yet, there's some works here[1] and
| there[2].
|
| [0]: https://github.com/fooyin/fooyin
|
| [1]: https://github.com/fooyin/fooyin/pull/476
|
| [2]: https://github.com/fooyin/fooyin/pull/579
| ezst wrote:
| > MacOS however truly takes the cake. An OS that's great for
| creative softwate, working with images, video, audio and so on
|
| Funny since there was quite a thread here yesterday or the day
| before about Mac users regretting the dumbification of their
| software, using aperture as a striking example.
|
| Don't read me wrong, I'm not saying that MacOS doesn't have
| great software, I just no longer trust Apple to pander to their
| users. A stable, open and progressive OS like Linux+KDE with
| "specialty" software on top seems like the most productive
| combo, I hope more software editors will consider that.
| maeln wrote:
| Honestly, the best (if you don't mind a TUI) is MPD + a TUI
| client like ncmpcpp or rmpc. Lightweight, fast and since it is a
| server, you can control it from outside. You can even output the
| stream in various format to give be able to play it from
| anywhere, although if it is having your own self-hosted spotify
| that you want, just use navimdrome.
| agent013 wrote:
| Worth noting that most of these GTK4/libadwaita players are going
| to look out of place on anything that isn't GNOME. If you're on
| KDE or a tiling WM, Strawberry or one of the Qt-based options
| will integrate much better
| jonkoops wrote:
| I am running KDE, and they look just fine. If you mean they
| won't follow your theme, yes, but also a lot of other apps
| don't (e.g. Electron).
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| I've found that libadwaita apps tend to look at least decent
| outside of their native environment, whereas QT apps near-
| universally look terrible outside of KDE.
| boje wrote:
| I haven't really looked into this, but is it possible to make
| GTK4 apps look liek standard GTK2/GTK3 applications? It feels
| like every single modern GTK app I've encountered has that
| modern Rounded-Material look to them and ignores the window
| manager decorations.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| > and ignores the window manager decorations.
|
| That's because Gtk4 does "client side decoration". That has
| the advantage (or otherwise, depending on your point of
| view!) that the application can now place custom widgets in
| the title bar, and the disadvantage that when apps do that,
| the part of the title bar available for dragging windows
| around becomes significantly smaller.
|
| My main objection to client-side decoration is that middle-
| clicking a window's title bar to push it to the back no
| longer works. (Plus, for those of us with eyes that aren't as
| young as they once were, it's now much harder to choose a
| window border style that clearly indicates which window has
| focus.)
| antisol wrote:
| My biggest problem (of _many_ ) with client side
| decorations is that now when your program crashes, you
| can't just hit the close button to have the window manager
| kill it, because the process responsible for drawing and
| responding to the close button has crashed.
|
| The trick is to avoid software using the newer gtk
| versions.
| atoav wrote:
| For me peak musicplayer UI is still my customized foobar2000
| setup on Windows.
|
| I need a waveform, a playhead, a good browser that can do both
| metadata based libraries and dumb folders fast and without
| lagging, a way to build/save/view/load playlists and a way to
| queue songs.
|
| Most players are just too basic or make the wrong or to many
| assumptions about my collection. Or the interface is just too
| cute and dysfunctional for my actual daily use.
|
| This means on Linux I currently use either mixxx or just VLC
| player, but I surely haven't tested every possible mediaplayer.
| squigz wrote:
| I think ncmpcpp might check all those boxes, with the caveat
| that it's a TUI player. Have you tried it?
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| I don't know how foobar2000 somehow got it so right so long ago
| and no one is replicating it making me stuck with it. I don't
| like the feeling of being stuck with software like this... What
| if it is abandonded or something...
| barbs wrote:
| You might be interested in Fooyin?
|
| https://fooyin.org/
| rpnop94 wrote:
| None of the current solutions work for someone like me. I have
| multiple versions of the same album so the UI needs to
| incorporate labels, catalog numbers, etc. and the playlists need
| to accommodate disc subtitles and grouping. The only two players
| that allow me this functionality are both on Windows so there's
| little available for the collectors such as myself.
| squigz wrote:
| Which players on Windows are you talking about?
| rpnop94 wrote:
| MusicBee and foobar2000 with the old SimPlaylist plugin.
| mmsc wrote:
| mocp is all you need
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Not mentioned in the article, so I'd like to give a shout-out to
| cmus.
|
| https://cmus.github.io/
|
| For all my fellow terminal friends <3
| wooque wrote:
| yes, GUI players come and go, cmus stays.
| politelemon wrote:
| This is a very good list, thanks for sharing it. Despite having
| been on a music player journey like the author, in surprised to
| see several on the list I've not encountered before. This just
| tells me that the state of music players on Linux is extremely
| healthy, and that makes sense, it's the only os where the concept
| of owning your data exists, so of course time and effort is being
| spent on this part too.
|
| In the end, for me anyway, I'm only listening to music and I
| didn't really care too much about what the player looked like,
| not as much as I thought I would. Even VLC, not mentioned here,
| is a well functioning music player and will do the job just fine.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Good old VLC couldn't be much simpler (or popular). Audio
| singles, drag-on. Folders of audio files, drag-on. Whatever's
| in the window can be easily saved as a named playlist.
| Including internet radio stations (there are thousands). Sort
| playlists into folders.
|
| Oh yeah, and also handles almost ALL video formats in the same
| way.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| VLC will also work as a media server and stream files
| outbound, which remote players can play (buffered) in real-
| time.
| amazari wrote:
| Came here to note that contrary to what is said here, Lollypop is
| not "new", nor is it representative of current so-called "GNOME-
| isms".
|
| It uses UI idioms and technologies (gtk 3) of its mileage, 2017.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| A lot of its UI idioms are quite unique to Lollypop, as well.
| fainpul wrote:
| I'm not thrilled by the music player options on Linux. I've tried
| many and found most of them awful. Even the author of this
| article notes negatives about all of the listed players, which I
| find unacceptable (except for _Recordbox_ , I'll have to look at
| that). And these are their favorites out of 200 players!
|
| It's the typical problem of free software: bad UI.
|
| I use _Music_ on macOS (disable the music store and it 's fine)
| and have used _Rhythmbox_ on GNOME (passable). Still looking for
| something good on Linux.
|
| List from the post, with the author's own criticism:
|
| _Amberol_
|
| This barely fits my criteria for features ... no library
| management
|
| _Euphonica_
|
| you will also need to set up MPD ... The UI chokes ... wish it
| had a song search function ... changing the volume requires using
| my scroll wheel on the volume knob
|
| _Feishin_
|
| You will need a music server ... Electron app
|
| _Lollypop_
|
| the user experience is painful
|
| _Plattenalbum_
|
| you will need to bring your own MPD ... cannot even see a list of
| all albums
|
| _Strawberry_
|
| less intuitive than I'd like it to be ... giant translucent
| strawberry in the middle of my screen at all times
|
| _Tauon_
|
| "everything-is-a-playlist" approach ... overwhelming and
| confusing ... stretched icons ... scroll bar is on the left of
| the window for some reason
| Zren wrote:
| > less intuitive than I'd like it to be giant translucent
| strawberry in the middle of my screen at all times
|
| You can disable the background image that in the options under
| Appearance. It's a holdover from Clementine's branding which I
| also find annoying. I also dislike the glow animation on
| currently playing track in the playlist which can also be
| disabled.
| volemo wrote:
| > It's the typical problem of free software: bad UI. > I use
| Music on macOS
|
| I'm surprised to read this. While I have quite high tolerance
| for bad UI and don't have my own opinion, I've heard many a Mac
| / iOS developer practically spit on Music.app design.
| eemil wrote:
| I want to switch to Roon, but the lack of a web client (let alone
| a native linux client!) makes it a total dead end.
| bondant wrote:
| There is a lot of choices in that area, but for me every time
| there was something I was unhappy with. So in the end I just
| wrote my own. It works exactly like I want, and it was a fun
| project to do anyway.
|
| Next stuff I want to add in it, is the automatic translation of
| lyrics (maybe with the deepl api).
| EddieB wrote:
| Great list! Not sure how I've missed all these in my search but
| I've had success with Plexamp (Gnome, Fedora), with Plex served
| from my Synology NAS. Opinions on Plex aside, it's been the most
| successful "native" experience across mobile/linux that just
| works.
|
| Majority of GTK/Adwaita solutions are always so close but missing
| something critical, especially when using DLNA (e.g treated as
| secondary to local library, intermittent first load issues etc)
| That said, I got quite far with Gapless [1]
|
| 1. https://gitlab.gnome.org/neithern/g4music
| ezst wrote:
| I tend to use strawberry these days, as an amarok convert from
| back in the kde3 days. My "workflow" is to go fish for the stuff
| that I'm in the mood to listen to in the moment, using the
| collection tree view, dragging and dropping mostly whole albums
| in a (new) playlist, then fine-tuning with the queue (generally
| hand picking 3-5 tracks I want to start with and then placing the
| marker on top of a whole album or something like that).
|
| I like the ability to build playlists with tracks from different
| sources, including subsonic-compatible servers (my "staging area"
| for new music is my local drive, and that then goes to a remote
| navidrome server once "curated").
|
| Over time, I end up with a dozen "topical" playlists, and here
| again, strawberry is pretty good at keeping things approachable
| and high-level.
|
| I also like that the grid control intro which the tracks are
| listed is so configurable.
|
| I like moodbars <3
| oskenso wrote:
| Audacious comes with Game Music Emu (Thank you Blargg!) for
| playing original game music data (nsf, gbs, spc, etc)
|
| I'm still looking for that perfect spotify replacement though
| qalmakka wrote:
| I for one still like the good old Cantata. It's still maintained
| by the community after the original dev bailed out, and it has
| good UX and lots of features. Feishin is also great but it's way
| heavier on RAM being basically a glorified website and all, so
| unless you have a reason to have Navidrome up and running it's
| overkill for most people
| b1temy wrote:
| I'm surprised the author didn't list KDE's Elisa:
| https://apps.kde.org/elisa/ Especially since they referenced KDE
| when they voiced their wish for Strawberry to be more modernized
| to match the appearance of KDE's Plasma desktop.
|
| I haven't used it for a while (I generally don't listen to music
| outside of my drive to work these days), but I remember it being
| a pleasant replacement for MusicBee when I first switched over to
| a Linux distro full-time, coming from Windows. The Elisa UI is
| nice too imo, though it's more of a "native UI" look compared to
| some of the others in the list, though which style is nicer is up
| to personal preference.
|
| It may also be a plus to some that it is not using Electron , and
| uses Qt instead (Well, apparently it uses QML, so still kind-of
| using ECMAScript/Javascript. But only for the user interface, and
| not the main business logic.)
| avd201 wrote:
| I remember struggling with it in the beginning (it has some
| quirks in the UI and how you configure folders and what have
| you) but once I got a hang on it it was pretty good
| mpawelski wrote:
| I don't use it much, but for a default audio player for KDE,
| it's surprisingly slow to open audio file just to play it once
| (around a second on my machine)
| hahn-kev wrote:
| Man QML is awesome, it's all native UI, and since it's not a
| browser it has a much simper runtime available for the js that
| you write.
| qrobit wrote:
| I was surprised not to find cantata[1], another MPD graphical
| client, on the list. Used it for the past three years, despite it
| being unmaintained for quite some time now. The client is very
| featureful, allows downloading lyrics and covers automatically
| (TBF had many mismatches, like downloading some Gillette ad as an
| Eminem's album cover). Most important to me is the ability to
| listen do directories and not artists/albums, which cantata does
| perfectly. Recently nixpkgs replaced cantata with a fork[2], so
| cantata is kind of online again.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/CDrummond/cantata
|
| [2]: https://github.com/nullobsi/cantata
| tmtvl wrote:
| Arch, Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE also use nullobsi's fork as
| Cantata's upstream, so I'm guessing it's the de facto
| upstream/origin now.
| diimdeep wrote:
| In conclusion, nothing simple and aesthetic like Winamp v5,
| Vox.app v2, or Aural.app (current), not surprising.
| butterknife wrote:
| After going through most of the rest I settled on Elisa as a good
| amalgam if winamp and itunes UX. I didn't realise it is obscure
| judging by no mention of it here.
|
| https://apps.kde.org/elisa/
| DarkWiiPlayer wrote:
| Oh this is a funny topic; I just found myself looking for a
| decent music player on linux like a month or so ago and the
| situation was... _disappointing_.
|
| The nicest looking one I could find was amberol, but that was a
| bit _too_ minimalistic for me. I like minimal UIs but that doesn
| 't have to translate to minimal feature sets as well.
|
| But in the end I didn't find any simple but hackable players that
| I liked; in the end I just settled on audacious because it's just
| _simple enough_ in terms of UI and _good enough_ in terms of
| features. I do like the playlists as tabs idea though.
| genevra wrote:
| Weird timing, I was just lamenting today how limited Linux music
| players are. The best looking one I've found is still Amberol but
| it doesn't even save your music. Then again the music player
| selection on Windows isn't that much better
| adamseddie wrote:
| https://webamp.org/
| kh_hk wrote:
| Cries in DeaDBeeF
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| I am still with Spotify, but for local playback I like ncmpcpp
| with MPD. My wishlist is for a native client that, in addition to
| local playback, integrates well with various streaming services
| like Spotify, online radio, Jellyfin, etc. But it's a hard
| problem. When I last checked it seemed Clementine used to be a
| good candidate for this but the Spotify plugin, at least, was no
| longer working at the time.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Surprised there's no mention of the tried-and-true VLC.
| rhdunn wrote:
| VLC does not show up when searching for "music player" on
| nixpkgs [1] which is what was used. Searching for "media
| player" does [2].
|
| [1]
| https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=unstable&query=mus...
|
| [2]
| https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=unstable&query=med...
| davidgerard wrote:
| This still comes across as ignorance of the area. How does
| one miss VLC?
| dSebastien wrote:
| Ohhh I just remembered Amarok!
| domh wrote:
| My friend made this site to try and surface the best place to buy
| music: https://streamtoshelf.com/
|
| He also made a section of the site that allowed you to login via
| Spotify and it would aggregate your listening history and tell
| you how much it would cost to buy all of your most listened to
| albums. Annoyingly Spotify seems to restrict the oauth app
| creation process, so users have to be invited by email to access
| that.
| alextingle wrote:
| I like Amberol's approach - no library management, just use the
| file-system. I use Picard to organise my music into a sensible
| directory structure, and so Amberol can see that and play by
| album or artist. It's really nice.
|
| It's crippled by its ridiculous refusal to see symbolic links. I
| want to use symlinks to create "playlists", without having to
| copy music files around, but now, to Amberol, it's as though sym-
| links don't exist.
|
| I looked into it, and it's down to weird Gnome and Flatpak
| policies, which are bizarrely averse to sym-links, because they
| are a "security risk". Yes, that's kind of true if you are root,
| but who runs their music player as root???
| rjh29 wrote:
| I went the other way. I just want to shuffle all my songs or a
| playlist (m3u) without any of the other crap. Add and remove
| favourites. Album-focused players are a non-starter. Players
| without a simple global search box are a non starter.
|
| Ended up 80% vibe coding one in Qt (PySide6) in a couple of
| evenings that does everything I want, exactly how I want. Added
| lyric fetching via LIBLRC (saved to .lrc files - no proprietary
| databases) and register as a music player with DBUS so it can be
| controlled. Working really well.
|
| It's 2026, anyone who is unhappy with their player can pretty
| quickly LLM their way into adding any missing functionality or
| tweak behaviour they don't like, or just make a whole new player.
| Gud wrote:
| I did the same for a media player with filtering. Works very
| well!
| iberator wrote:
| Imo last good Linux player was... XMMS. Never understood why it
| went away from most distributions forever.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Never understood why it went away from most distributions
| forever.
|
| CADT.
|
| "Because of the release of GNOME 2.0 and 2.2, and the lack of
| interest in maintainership of GNOME 1.4, the gnome-core product
| is being closed. If you feel your bug is still of relevance to
| GNOME 2, please reopen it and refile it against a more
| appropriate component. Thanks... "
|
| Xmms uses gtk 2 i think. GTK is now at version 4 or 5.
| iberator wrote:
| Someone have those cool AI code tools? Perfect job for a
| rewrite haha
| barbs wrote:
| Apparently Audacious is a descendant of XMMS, though I
| haven't used either of them.
|
| https://audacious-media-player.org/
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Doesn't even mention MOC.
| ValveFan6969 wrote:
| Complaining about predatory business practices while dumping all
| your money to Taylor Swift is like giving the homeless guns and
| complaining about rising murder rates.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I have lots of music in exotic formats and an installation of
| foobar2000 that plays all of them. I keep using foobar2000 even
| though I switched to Fedora KDE because I don't see any
| alternative that will allow me to play music without forcing me
| to convert everything. Also, I have an Android app to control
| foobar2000 from my phone.
|
| Big downsides are that scaling is broken on Wine so the UI is
| tiny. Moreover, whenever I manually change tracks using the
| mouse, it lets out a massive fart before continuing normally. But
| I can live with that.
|
| Hmmm, now that I think of it - I've never made any GUI app.
| Suppose I want to write my own music player, what's the best way
| to approach this?
| barbs wrote:
| Fooyin looks to be inspired by foobar2000 that compiles
| natively on Linux, but I haven't tried it.
|
| https://fooyin.org/
| tasuki wrote:
| The thing I don't understand is alphabetic ordering of albums,
| which is the default most everywhere. Albums of a particular
| artist should _obviously_ be ordered by when they were released
| (I don 't care whether from newest or from oldest).
|
| It appears I'm an alien: almost none of the music players'
| authors care about this - they happily show albums from A to Z.
|
| I use Clementine which can be set up to order albums by year. Any
| other options?
| fainpul wrote:
| It's probably not gonna help you, but that's possible in
| _Music_ (macOS). There are two sorting criteria, so you could
| choose to sort by artist first, then for each album of a given
| artist sort by year. Or you can sort all albums by year, then
| inside each year alphabetically (album or artist) if that 's
| what you meant.
|
| It's a simple option to implement. But most developers without
| UI skills don't seem to think about stuff like that.
| musictubes wrote:
| The problem with that is that things like remasters, special
| editions, etc. screw up the timeline. Those are listed when
| they came out but that means they are not in original
| releases order any longer.
| t-3 wrote:
| It's possible in mpd+ncmpcpp, but I just encode this in the
| filesystem hierarchy. My library is basically setup like
| music/artist/year album/trackno trackname. I had to spend a few
| hours going through by hand with perl-rename to normalize
| things, but after that it was great (I don't trust automatic
| tools to do these things after bad experiences with beetz and
| similar).
| swed420 wrote:
| Jellyfin can order albums by year, though I assume many readers
| of this thread are looking for a self contained player rather
| than client/server setup like Jellyfin.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Whats the most similar to something like AnyTune?
|
| https://www.anytune.app/
| sylens wrote:
| For anyone who self hosts their own music library with Plex or
| Jellyfin, I'd recommend keeping an eye on Chromatix[0]. It's a
| great client for Plex or Jellyfin based libraries on macOS and
| Windows, and a Linux version is on the roadmap.
|
| [0] https://chromatix.app/
| Gud wrote:
| What I don't understand is how we let XMMS die?
| hettygreen wrote:
| One more vote for FOOBAR2000 under WINE.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| On Windows i have used foobar2000 since i had a crt monitor that
| got too dark for winamp so about 20 years. In 2 years daily using
| Steam Deck as my main computing device and trying almost every
| linux music player. I settled on using a spare android phone
| running Symfonium + Navidrome on Raspberry pi. As nothing on
| linux comes close.
| musictubes wrote:
| JRiver is an advanced media player that works cross platform
| including Linux. It isn't the prettiest thing around and
| understanding everything that it can do can be frustrating but it
| will do just about anything you'd like a media player to do.
|
| I rarely interact with it directly. I usually use JRemote on my
| iPad or iPhone to control it. There is also an incredibly fast
| web front end you can use in whatever device you want.
|
| Does the old Logitech music server (or whatever it is called
| these days) work on Linux? There have been a bunch of front end
| programs to use those servers.
| cantalopes wrote:
| Super surprised nobody mentioned Sayonara - practically native
| winamp for linux
| subsection1h wrote:
| Wow, 120 comments and not one person who uses mpg123[1] or
| ffplay[2] with shell scripts for playlists.
|
| [1] The most minimal media player I know of. Written in assembly.
| Supports only MP3.
|
| [2] The most minimal media player I know of that supports more
| formats than MP3.
| tmtvl wrote:
| I like using Cantata, a Qt-based MPD client. Because it's Qt it
| fits in nicely on my Plasma desktop and because it's an MPD
| client it is quite good at keeping my collection organised. I do
| have my default music player set to VLC because I don't like
| using Cantata to play random audio files I want to listen to (by
| which I mean 'which sound effect is this wav file').
| luyu_wu wrote:
| Quick shoutout to Fooyin (https://github.com/fooyin/fooyin) which
| is a customizeable and very performant music player. Built on
| QtWidgets, so it's very snappy and themeable.
| zombot wrote:
| I'm about to flee from macOS. Can't buy new Apple hardware any
| more because that will come with their atrocious new OS, and I
| have exactly zero hopes for any improvements in the future. So my
| next computer has to run Linux, and this article (and the other
| comments) is a very welcome aid for the transition.
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