🎵 Plays & manages your music library. Looks beautiful & juicy.
Well, I have to say that Harmonoid is the best one I've found, it has a ton of cool features, it works and it allows you to be able to see your collection by album and it doesn't use Electron. Right now its development has stalled a bit but it's still pretty much in good shape, though.
Is Amarok still a thing? I stopped using players a few years back in favour of Spotify, but I'm considering self hosting a collection again, and I remember Amarok being the best player by far.
It's the only thing I'm actually missing after my switch to Linux.
Music playback and organization, file conversion, replay gain and exporting to USB devices all in a single program with a highly customizable UI on top. So far I haven't found anything that comes even close to replacing all that. Too bad it isn't open source.
I've been using PlexAmp for a long time, but I've had a lifetime subscription to Plex for several years now. They have versions for Linux and a headless version you can run on a Raspberry Pi (this one still requires PlexPass).
I use Sonixd and Feishin. Feishin is the re-write of Sonixd, but only supports Navidrome currently (which is actually what I need; apparently *sonic support is incoming). Sonixd still works though, and is nice.
Sadly still no alternative that comes even close to MusicBee.
I need one that does it all. Extremely large library, complete and complex searching, filtering, changing which columns are displayed/how, complete tags editing and display including less common ones, and the ability to add custom library tags (such as tags for grouping purposes, which I use extensively on top of Genre and Comment).
Also need gapless play, ability to add fade in/out and control the length of that fade either when skipping or between all tracks, ability to edit the start/end of some tracks, etc.
And good tools for auto-tagging, automatically fetching album art, easy re-organizing like MusicBee which allows you to auto-rename and move selected files along customizable rules, etc etc etc.
MusicBee has tons of really good tools and 90% of them are basically required for how I organize and add to my library.
And a clean and configurable UI where I can decide what I want to see and where it is, wavebar, visualizers, good controls and a nice auto-DJ, etc etc.
Works really well with Wine now, but still there's some annoying things like it not being detected as a media source, and not being recognized by the normal media buttons/widgets. Also recurring audio problems (need to refresh Pipewire or switch the sink) which have gotten better but still not quite there.
God audio stuff on linux still has a long way to go.
I thought I was the only person who used MusicBee. Crazy to hear it not only brought up, but recommended here. I started using it years ago on a whim after a really basic "try these windows music players!" listicle
Haha currently I use VLC beta from the Ubuntu PPA, ran through Distrobox as I am on Fedora and they dont seem to damn care about RPMs. Also no beta Flatpak, even though this beta is sooo good, new UI and flac fixes.
I find it interesting how large the difference between tastes regarding music players is. After the development of Cantata ceased, I was unable to find any mpd client that I liked and decided to write my own instead (if anyone is interested, the code is available at https://github.com/dokutan/cmpdc)
Using sonixd for desktop and finamp for mobile through my Jellyfin server and really liking it.
I did have to make a separate Jellyfin account for my music since I didn't want music showing up on the Jellyfin TV apps cluttering it up but not bad overall!
Finamp doesn't track new items in a playlist marked for offline play which is my main gripe atm.
Looks great, and it works great on my desktop. I also quite like its simplicity.
However, after playing around with it for a bit, I noticed one glaring flaw. It stores its playlists in one (potentially) huge playlists.json file. It's great if you're manually creating playlists from scratch. However, I've had several playlists that I've compiled from my time in iTunes, and then MediaMonkey, all of which are now in an m3u format. I can play them in Harmonoid just fine, though it only shows song info for the first song in the playlist, even though it does play the rest of the songs just fine.
Meanwhile, since Harmonoid also has a mobile version, I also played around with it. My playlists worked better over there as it shows the track information for all tracks, not just the first one. I haven't dug up the files to see how they're being stored, though.
I guess a feature like "playlist import/export" can be requested. Personally though, looking at the JSON data within the playlist.json file, however, IDK:
Aqualung for me, but I don't use 90% of its features. It was the first thing I found that had a good-enough GUI but didn't try to force music library functionality on me (it has it, but it's willing to let me leave it off and just use the directory structure I long ago optimized for the weird nature of my collection).
I use Guayadeque for basically one reason only: it supports multiple libraries/collections. I wish more players had this feature. My collection is basically unmanageable without it, and it's large but not that large (about 30k tracks). Are they any other players that support multiple libraries?
Been looking for an alternative for iTunes for ages. iTunes runs like hot garbage on my PC, but for me it just seemed like there just wasn’t anything like it for offline music playback an d management.
This looks very promising, I’ll definitely check it out. Thanks!