Searching for the best Music Player

WAIT!

before you start commenting that TUI musicplayer xy is the best, my priorities:

must have:

• support for m3u playlists (synced to Android with Syncthingy) should autodetect them in a single folder I use also for the music files, and read/write them
• support for viewing all files
• support for custom music directories
• support for deleting music files
• Flatpak OR clutterfree on KDE

would like:

• Pipewire output
• nice simple GUI
• modern, clutterfree design OR customizability
• subtitles, cover images, etc.

I used G4Music which looks awesome and has minimal playlist support. It works really well but it cant write to the playlist. It is blazingly fast, and I made an issue, offering a bounty for write-to-playlist support.

I found Lollypop, the old GTK UI is way better than the Qt alternatives, while still kinda ugly. But it seems to tick all boxes, apart from Pipewire support.

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What I tried:

G4Music

• UI perfect
• no file deletion
• no playlist addition
• no playlist creation

Lollypop

• UI is bareable
• pulseaudio, no setting at all
• playlist support including writing to! You need to enable it
• lots of internet stuff for artwork and subtitles
• sane defaults

GNOME music

• does not detect my .m3u playlists
• slow
• needs pulseaudio
• settings are a joke
• no folder view

Strawberry

• UI is horrible and not customizable enough
• no Pipewire support
• no .m3u detection
• cluttered, no UI zoom possible
• system icon theme is not applied

Clementine

• like strawberry but different?
• more online stuff
• interface less customizable
• cursor broken on the Flatpak

Amarok

• Strawberry in even older?
• bloat?
• retro-development status

MusicPod

• UI hides too much stuff
• no playlist support
• no filesystem hierarchy support
• strange Ubuntu look, but good UI, fancy background
• no podcast backup file support (so Kasts is better for that)
• but pipewire support!

Plattenalbum

• no playlist support
• otherwise looks great

Resonance

• modern, GTK4 Libadwaita, UI is damn lit
• freezes, fills up the entire RAM (scans every title at once!) -> not optimized at all, made system freeze and needed to hard shutdown.
• no playlist support?
• no pipewire support?

Melody

• uses soon EOL GNOME 42 runtime

Amberol

• beautiful but too minimalist
• why are there soo many GNOME music players??

moosync

• very nice UI
• electron: tiny cursor on Wayland, no Pipewire support
• plugin support for Youtube, Spotify (using librespot) and LastFM
• local playlists seem broken