What's your favorite music player on Linux?

const_void@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 426 points –

Mine is Strawberry since it has a ton of options and plays a ton of formats. It's also (distant) fork of Amarok 1.4 and integrates well with KDE Plasma. I'm curious what other people are using these days. What's your favorite player?

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First it was Amarok, then Clementine, and now it's Strawberry.

I use Clementine because it lets me rate my songs. Does Strawberry do that? If it does I'll give it a try.

Strawberry is basically a fork of Clementine from when it was abandoned.

mpd + ncmpc

I am but a simple man. All my music is FLAC. It is arranged neatly in folders. I just want to select an album to play. I do not need album covers, playlists, search, streaming, tags, lyrics, analyzers, or scrobbling.

Agreed, with the exception of album covers. I like it all to look nice on my Hidizs when I'm on the go.

More of a gmpc kinda person. Unless there's a better GUI for mpd out there?

There's always mpdas for scrobbling

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CMUS! I'm surprised more people aren't using this. It's very cool, ultra lightweight, and easy to use. Maybe I just like stuff that runs in the console.

cmus is great, it checks all my boxes, and is much easier to work with than mpd imo. The only downside for me is that I can't see any of the cover art :(

There is no great/simple linux music player with proper cover display. Eliza was so wonky when I tried it months ago, the most simple functions didn't work properly (like sorting for release year etc.)

Also the hotkeys are terrible, I really really want to use it properly, but those shortcuts are horrid.

MPD + ncmpcpp, I hate both and I'm yet to find anything better.

mpd is the best music player on any system

I’ve started using Cantata as a graphical front end, though

I feel this. If you could right click to interact with the text objects, then this combo would basically feel like foobar2000 for linux. I'm old enough to have missed how great foobar2000 felt after WinAmp started to get bloated (back before I got my hands on some Linux ISOs), so MPD + ncmpcpp just felt so refreshingly stripped down and a little nostalgic. I just fucking hate having to memorize a bunch of non-intuitive hotkey combos to do anything. Probably the same reason I've never bothered to properly learn Vim.

I'm an Emacs graybeard, so complex keybindings don't scare me. My problem with ncmpcpp is twofold:

  1. It relies on MPD which is always a PITA to properly configure. Pulseaudio always managed to make it not work on a fresh system. Hopefully with Pipewire it'll be better.
  2. The config format make no sense whatsoever. Especially the one with keybindings. It's so cryptic I just stopped trying to understand it. Again, I'm an Emacs graybeard, to stress it as a point of reference.

MPD + ncmpcpp, I hate both and I’m yet to find anything better.

I’m an Emacs graybeard

Emacs does have a music player, emms, which is what I use.

M-x package-install RET emms RET

I'm aware but thank you. I've tried it before and didn't like it. Maybe I'll give it another shot, though I don't see much benefit in tying my music player to Emacs.

When I'm using Windows, I still use foobar2000 for listening to radio streams.

DeaDBeeF Player, I like lightweight and simple music players.

My fave too as it's closest to foobar, critically with the tagging interface I prefer. Have you added any additional plugins to your install? I tried adding a few (music library, Discord Rich Presence) but must be the right sort of stupid not to understand the instructions. facepalm

Spotify 🫥

It's the one I use most, even though it sucks. I like that I can control it with my phone

Spotify (adblock) from the AUR 😈

No ads & you can still login to your account

Rhythmbox. It was pre-installed on Ubuntu back when I was on Ubuntu, and I kinda just got used to it. Strawberry looks really cool though, I may have to give it a try

Rhythmbox is great and works well for editing tags for my 15,000 track library. I went to Lollypop for a while trying to get some more features but I ended up back at Rhythmbox.

Clementine

I was using Clementine for a long time and switched to Strawberry about a year ago. Since they're related, migrating libraries from one to the other was also possible.

I don't really love any that I've tried so far, but I dislike Audacious the least. FLAC, Musepack, and ReplayGain support are requirements for my library.

The last one I loved was foobar2000 on Windows, which supplanted Winamp. Linux UIs mostly feel a bit clunky by comparison. When the window has focus I like to have spacebar for pause/play, arrows up/down for primary gain, and arrows left/right for seek.

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I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that spotify sucks, they hate artists but love Joe Rogan. If you can't buy albums via bandcamp, Tidal offers quality and royalties far superior to Spottily. You can transfer your playlist in a few clicks and the price is almost identical (6 accounts for like $15/m).

One Swedish company for another. Joke aside, isn't the whole problem with royalties in the music scene still the issue that the record labels taking 90% of profits?

Thr issue with spotify I have is only one. Its pretty good at predicting new songs with radio that I may like and I usually use the radio feature as I dont like to repeat my own playlists over and over.

Tidal's algorythm is excellent for suggestions and the radio feature works well. I wasn't sure at first but after a few months of listening to my stuff, Tidal strated to get really good at suggestions. My only issue left is how picky the search engine is Any spelling mistake will get you no results, but I can live with that. I work in studio environnement so getting access to uncompressed master files is huge for me.

I gave it a short try just to see if my fav artists are there. Yes. Didnt expect this. Also feels much more serious than spotify. I will see if the algorithm does its job.

Its weird how at first it only displayed music I would never listen to or is not near the artists I selected at the beginning. I guess I need to listen and favoritize them. And wait?...

Edit: It got a bit better over time. But there are a few songs still missing on Tidal 💀

Tidal sucks for EDM. Trance and progressive in particular.

But didn't they had the issue with supporting MQA, which kinda was a scam? As far as I know they now switched to FLAC, but it still feels a bit weird.

Yeah MQA felt indeed bit of a weird for a lossy codec. FLAC is a real lossless format that's been around for a long time, I'm glad they now use it. I like the fact that Tidal can be set to different quality on wi-fi vs phone data. Anyway, Tidal is still a buisness with only profit as a goal, but they give 3 times more to artists. Best way to support artist will always be by going to shows and buying albums and merchs, but most people wants a streaming sevice so IMO Tidal is the best right now. One day maybe Funkwhale or another decentralized option will offer a real revenu model for artists.

Audacious

I just have my music collection in Playlist and use Audacious to play them. All the music in the Playlist are saved in relative format so I can just copy the folders and keep the same Playlists

I ended up writing a perl script to generate a .m3u from a root music directory that shuffles all the subdirs so I can listen to full albums in random order instead of just tracks.

I did something similar except I wrote a C# program and used AvaloniaUI to build a cross-platform GUI. It was a project to learn C#. I have to make some updates to that now that I think about it...

Audacious with winamp skins, weening off windows' foobar2000 as an old favorite, jellyamp, amberol occasionally

Check out Deadbeef, it looks like it might be what foobar was on windows (at least partially).

I'm still using foobar under wine in Linux for the discogs tagger alone.

discogs tagger

Might want to check out MusicBrainz Picard for this purpose

Let's just hope it's better than the music brains tagger itself. It's been some years since I've tried it. I'll admit. The mess it made the last time that has made me reluctance to give it another chance despite generally supporting what they do. I may just be a little OCD about my collection sometimes lol. But if it can actually get the right artist information, etc. Allow me to store stuff in a particular directory structure relatively easily and get cover art. It might stand a chance. I will give the AUR a check here in a bit to see if it has it.

  • Edit I will give it a little bit more try. But I haven't found any way to configure the data that it's pulling etc. Which is really going to limit it for my purposes. I have a lot of different things. That it's just not getting correctly. I tried only a few albums. But the data it pulled was for a different release with much fewer tracks.

For what it’s worth, I have this problem sometimes when an album has multiple releases and you can choose which release to pull tags from via the context menu in Picard. There’s also a pretty powerful scripting language that you can use to specify the directory and file re-naming structure as well. It took me a while to get my structure set up properly but once I did it’s been a life saver in keeping my files organized.

If there’s something in particular you’re trying to achieve that’s not working I’d be happy to try and help!

I hadn't seen that yet. Although unfortunately, my experimenting with the tool ended abruptly last night when the LCD panel on the system went out. I may install it on a different system and see if I can figure out how to select releases that should solve the issue.

There is no program I miss quite as much as winamp. It really kicked the lama's ass.

I use CMUS because I mainly work within terminal, without a mouse, and the controls feel like Vim

  • Cmus.
  • mpg123 4 internet radios.
  • FFplay | mpv.
  • zxtune.
  • Years ago: moc or deadbeef (because foobar2000).

Audacious with a winamp skin. Nostalgic.

Elisa for when i want my whole music library (it is a bit lacking in features tho), audacious w/ winamp classic skin (~vibes~) when im just playing files on my kde plasma box, and cmus on my qtile setup :3 also sicmuplayer on android cuz its the best

This person has visualisers and I'm here for it.

amberol

About 2 years ago, I moved my music to Jellyfin and have been using their media players on every platform I use (iOS, FireTV, Ubuntu, and Windows). At this point my music library is close to 200 GB, kinda hard to store that much on every device I own.

Lollypop. Simple interface that shows me album art. I can't always remember band names or artist names but I know what the damn album cover looks like 👍

Agreed.

The feature I like the most in Lollypop is the party mode. It lets the user select various music genres from your library and it plays songs that match the selected options

Yeah, put me down for Strawberry too. I used to use Rhythmbox up until mid 2023, I started to get into high res music and I got a tidal subscription, so switched to Strawberry.

Strawberry is also great if you are on windows as well. I support it in general, whether you use it on Windows or Linux. I've been using it whenever I want to listen to my music on my windows machine. Definitely gonna be using it with my next Linux machine (that isn't my absolute dogshit laptop). Before learning about Strawberry, I was just using Foobar2000 or VLC, which both just don't feel anywhere near as good to me than Strawberry.

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VLC because it works with everything and it doesn't try to organise my music collection for me.

Yeah why the fuck does everything have to organize your collections?

I use Darktable for editing pictures; I have my own organization system and do not need Darktable's help with that...why does Darktable feel the need to be my collection organizer, too? (Because other photo editing programs do it, that's why, and apparently some people do use that feature. I just don't need it.)

Because unlike your file manager both Darktable and any decent music player can work with file metadata in addition to the actual files.

And why do they do it? Because most people like to use it that way - instead of painstakingly making sure your files are in the correct folders (and then being fucked when you want to play anything that's not sorted like that - say, you have everything by artist and album, but now you want to play everything by a specific genre; or in image editing you want to filter by how you rated that picture so you know which one to pick for an edit).

Not everyone needs that, sure. But most people appreciate it - especially if the software does it well.

You can do all of that with most basic file explorers. I use Dolphin on KDE. Change the view to "details" and right click the top and choose which metadata fields you want to show up. Then you can sort or filter using metadata.

It just adds another layer of abstraction when my file manager works just fine. I think it started back in the iPod days, and now you have a generation of people who don't know how to manage files.

Very possible. I like how Jellyfin and Plex are like, "We'll use your collection where it sits and try to figure out show name, season, and episode number from your filename convention!" And it mostly works.

Unfortunately when I installed Jellyfin, it put a lot of metadata in my /var partition, which was low on space. Oops on that one. So I had to shut down Jellyfin and delete the data until I get that situation resolved (that partition needs more space anyway).

...which is pretty ironic considering that the way they do it (at least in Jellyfin) is extremely limited and for some reason they don't use the file metadata. Like, I already have all the music metadata correct. So use that, not some fucking filename.

Nothing honestly. Couldn't find a music player that doesn't look like a file manager, has good search and queue features and doesn't make strong assumptions about how music is organized. Tried to run Musicolet through waydroid but it doesn't support Nvidia gpus

For the most part I use ncmpcpp with mpd, but sometimes whenever I just want to listen to a single file I use mpv --no-video instead....

I stream from my Navidrome server, Supersonic is great.

+1 for navidrome running on my nas

I use the navidrome server and web player on my Linux os and my phone.

You use supersonic to connect to navidrome as the front end? Any advantage?

Navidrome’s web player is actually pretty good and I could totally live with it if third party clients weren’t an option. Supersonic is more performant when loading 1800+ song playlists though, and infinite scrolling instead of the paginated web library is really nice.

Thank you. Yes the infinite scrolling would be nice.

I haven't loaded that many playlists or songs yet so I will keep an eye on performance and remember supersonic..

Cheers mate!

No one really. I've tried a bunch but never found one that felt just right. Clementine is the one that gets the closest.

I really wish MusicBee had a Linux port, it's the only thing I miss from Windows.

I love MusicBee. Was browsing through this post to see if anyone recommended anything that is similar to it, but still nothing.

Man, I miss MusicBee, it was a beast. I wish it was on Linux.

MPD + Cantata
For the most part I just lump all my music into one playlist regardless of album or genre, but day to day I also use several different computers, and I find MPD to be the best for syncing configurations across all of them. Cantata also allows me to see album artwork and track information really easily and has good touchscreen support compared to terminal-based MPD clients.

Cantata

Sadly it looks like it's no longer maintained

https://github.com/CDrummond/cantata

+1 for Cantata! Although it's not maintained, there's really nothing missing from it. It's complete as it is! Plays anything and you can also have your podcasts and web radio stations in it.

My distro came with Rhythmbox and I've pretty much just stuck with it. It does podcasts and radio which I appreciate and I can also edit track metadata in it. For playing music from my file browser I use MPV because it's fast.

lightweight media server Super fast indexing. Smooth web client. Also supports the subsonic api. I've been using the web client locally for some years now. I can also access my library on the go with substreamer on Android which is great. https://github.com/epoupon/lms

How do you get dark mode in Strawberry under KDE? I remember trying to follow some guides and not having much luck. But that was a long time ago at this point. Does this "just work" now?

Should just work with the defaults but check these settings:

Thanks! I checked and actually, dark mode was already on. Huh. I guess I haven't tried since...I don't even know. Maybe I didn't have qt6 installed last time?

Rythmbox. Syncs to my iPod Classic.

I wish RhythmBox can sync with my iPhone so I don’t need to rely on expensive or semi working MP3 Player app on App Store to listen to music

Sayonara

sayonara is very useful for those who have a large offline library

  • plus i like the visual ascetic of viewing my library by album covers

VLC when I'm listening to local files, ncspot for Spotify.

I agree with Strawberry. I'd love if Music Bee ever got a linux port or equivalent though

Just mpv for me. Simplest and most versatile option

if I'm using gui on my laptop, then amberol

if I'm using my headless server, then you can't get anything better than mpd

Seconding this. MPD + ncmpcpp + an MPRIS plugin. With the latter I can control the music playback through global keyboard shortcuts and the system tray UI if necessary.

Strawberry if I had to have something visual with buttons.

cmus right now because it loads my rather large library in a split second. mpd works great as well.

More important than the player for me is sorting, though. Beets is my saviour. I could never sort the 5 or 6 albums I get by hand and tag them by hand.

I used to like deadbeef as well, quod libet is great. There really is something for everyone when it comes to something for music. If only there were as many great email clients.

Quod Libet is my current favorite. It gives me a lot of the features and layout I used in Foobar2000 in Windows and isn't gigantic.

Going to ask here, anyone know a music player that is similar to AIMP? It has no native support, unfortunately.

https://www.aimp.ru/?do=download&os=linux

I'm also curious if anyone has any recommendations on this. I've used it for so many years that it's hard to switch to anything else! I've just been running it through Lutris on my main computer.

I've always just used audacious. It's been good. That said, I recently installed plex amp and the more I used it, the more I like it!

Mpd and Cantata. Deadbeef for playing from a directory or for conversation. I haven't found anything as good as cantata but I have to admit that I miss the monolithic and do everything of musicbee.

Tori. Play music in your terminal. Built in rust and has great performance, and low trace on memory impact.

used to be a rhythmbox guy but I've been using audacious for a few years now

Tauon Music Box available on Flathub. You look for albums by typing on your keyboard. Once you see the result which says "Artist", hit enter. It creates a playlist which shows all the albums of that playlist. The next time you want to listen to that artist, start typing and select "[Artist name] playlist". This concept differs from a traditional concept of playlists, because it doesn't actually create playlists you can use or export. I just like the UI, although the play controls are bit weird, they don't quite work the way you'd expect them to. It's a new project but worth keeping an eye on.

I settled with Navidrome. It solves 2 use cases for me. Due to being web based it can be used by any PC or mobile device with access to my server. Additionally it supports subsonic which allows me to use a native android app (ultrasonic) and have music on the go. I don't use services like Spotify.

Sonixd is a nice client for navidrome.

Thanks for the tip but I'm not sure why I would choose a desktop client over Navidrome itself. I usually have the browser open anyway. But maybe I'm missing something useful by using an actual app?

I'm also interested in this answer to see if I'm missing anything

I too use navidrome via web browser

Don't have one I love. Will have to review these comments!

Currently I use the Jellyfin web UI. Usage-wise it's decent, but I don't love using a browser for music.

Previously I was using mopidy + mopidy-Jellyfin + ncmpdcpp but it broke and I never got around to figuring out why. I didn't particularly enjoy ncmpdcpp. Great piece of software, don't get me wrong, just didn't like the TUI music client experience as thought I would.

Checking out GUI based mpd client ecosystem seems like the next logical step.

Logitech Media Server, followed by strawberry, quod libet, rhythmbox

Quod libet starts to act funny with 50,000 flac collections. Rhythmbox too. LMS is still chugging at 100k and I can get it on any room in the house, across 2 clients on computers, 2 on raspberry pi and my android phone. If I want to listen to 24/96+, Strawberry can handle it all although I haven't warmed up to the interface. Volumio sucks, it's way too slow.

Just a counter anecdote for others, I haven't had an issue with Quod Libet with over 100k tracks and have been using it for years so YMMV.

I used to use Strawberry, but my collection has grown enough that I can't just sync it everywhere, so I use Jellyfin now. I still use Strawberry's library management to move files into album artist/album/00 - track.ext though. Someday I'll dig into id3v2 to just write a script instead.

If you want to continue to use Strawberry, you could stream your music with a subsonic server, Strawberry supports that.

For me it was the other way round: I was using Nextcloud music and searched for a music player on Linux that could stream my .flac-collection via subsonic. That is how I found Strawberry.

Mpd has always served me well. I use ncccmmmmppp (however its spelled) to manage playlists and such. For album artwork I run sxiv pointed at file in /tmp/. I forget how that part works, actually. I have a grid layout on a second monitor, so I just square up the mpd client and sxiv. Doesn't look too bad.

Semi-related, but as a project I ripped out the pressure/impact pads of an old midi keyboard for use as prev/(pause/unpause)/next buttons, so if the song sucks I can literally punch my desk to skip it.

ncccmmmmppp (however its spelled)

Thanks fish shell for suggesting me the right name with just “nc” ’cause I can’t remember it either

Couldn't find any that works for me. At the moment I just play my music in mpv from terminal.

Foobar2000 has been here for YEAAAARS, and I don't think there is a good enough equivalent for linux, and by that I mean playlist tabs, global shortcuts, etc

It's the best. Thankfully it still works just fine under Wine, even if I haven't really bothered to use it there lately.

Considering that I'm using Emby (selfhost), it's able to manage my music collection too and I can play the music from the web player exposed by it.

Why emby over jellyfin if I may ask

Stability and configuration options. I already used Jellyfin but for me is not stable. It often crashes and configuration options are a mess at the moment.

That's fair, I haven't ever given Emby a shot, and wanted to hear what may have drawn someone to emby over jf. Thank you

Dolphin + mpv for me so I can see the album covers and metadata and see whats available, if I have a specific song in mind, then ill just use the terminal and mpv.

I use apple music. On linux I use Ciderwhich is amazing. Super clean interface and lots of nobs to turn in order to make everything sound and behave the way I like. If you like apple music or are looking for a streaming solution cider is awesome.

I used to download my music with NewPipe and listen to it on Musicolet, but since then, i just gave up and got a cracked spotify client

I really like Elisa.

I mostly use it to listen to music that's not in my Jellyfin library yet but it does that beautifully.

Plexamp all the way, easily the sexiest music player I've found so far. All my music is FLAC pulled from Deezer, and since I've got a very large list of artists tracked, it's super easy to discover new music with the radio and sonic analysis features. It's also got a last.fm integration, which gives me more data than Spotify would about my listening habits.

The only feature I'm really missing in it is collaborative playlists. I can share playlists out to anyone on my Plex server, but they can't add or remove songs.

I have to say Supersonic.

It's a Subsonic player that integrate with my Airsonic instance in Docker.

It requires a backend like Airsonic, Navidrome etc. It's not a stand alone player.

Clementine. Strawberry is getting there but still doesn't have as many features.

Edit: huh, I didn't expect a downvote on Lemmy for my opinion. Is reddit leaking through? Weird.

Yeah I miss the visualizations in clementine, and project M doesn't seem to work for me on my system w strawberry. It loads but it doesn't seem like it's responding to playing music.

Depending on how it's packaged, the visualizations might be missing. I noticed that too.

Feishin for me and occasionally strawberry

Haven't used it in a while but Amberol is simple (all I need) and gorgeous (which I care about).

Spotify-wayland on hyprland. And I also definetly dont have SpotX-bash, a great spotify adblocker installed!

On Windows, I like Plexamp since I can keep all my music on a Plex server and access it whereever. There's a Linux version but I haven't tried it on Linux yet.

Firefox (invidious). Its free, no ads, and I dont have to store files locally.

I used to use Amarok, but now I have a subscription to Youtube Music. It gives me a lot of flexibility on running it in a browser or on Android without worrying about syncing.

Musicbee with wine! I have never been able to find something that does it all as well as musicbee, and I've tried almost every single linux music player. I have a huge music library, I add a ton of music regularly. I need auto-tagging, i need to be able to sort, filter and search, a very customizable interface, all of the mp3 tags including obscure ones, gapless playback, configurable fade-in/fade-out, etc etc. With the exception of a few little nitpicks like not integrating well with the KDE media widget, and some occasional annoyances with pipewire, everything works great.

I just use Navidrome's web client. It does everything I need. DSub on Android.

Aqualung—does the small set of things I need it to, and is content to operate on files and directories rather than force the creation of a "music library" that doesn't in any way match how I categorize my music (although if you actually want a music library, it can do that). Only issue is that it's still GTK2, which may become a problem within the next few years.

I usually listen to music on YouTube when I'm using a computer. When I play my own music, it's from my Plex server with plexamp with a phone. I rarely use the plexamp desktop app.

Desktop/Laptop: Ncmpcpp + mopidy-mpd + jellyfin-plugin

Mobile: Finamp

Homeserver: Jellyfin

With this setup I'm able to manage and play my playlists on every device.

Foobar2000, which is a Windows application but available as a snap using wine.

I really want to use DeaDBeeF because it is Linux native and has similar customization features (I like big album art, for example), but sadly its library management leaves a lot to be desired compared to Foobar's. I don't want to have to generate a playlist every time I want to listen to an album, nor do I want to have to clear that playlist when I'm done.

I haven't found any other player with even remotely similar customization available.

On Android its NewPipe. No ads, free, I can create playlists, and I dont have to store anything local.

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