What's your favorite music player on Linux?
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?
I have been bouncing between CLI/GUI and several there of. On the CLI side I'm flipping back and forth between cmus and musikcube. I prefer cmus as it seems faster and has vim key motions an commands, but I like the TUI of musikcube better, its just got soo much extra stuff I don't use. I'd love to find a rust rewrite of it that trimmed out the web-server and most of the plugins as I never use them (and yes all you suckless heads I know, I could edit source and rebuild it but... Ain't nobody got time for that).
Another point for these is being able to detach them, both work fine in detached sessions so I can start an album or playlist and just say that's it, back to work. I use Zellij but I imagine using tmux or whatever would work just as well.
Now as for graphical apps I tend to use Amberol or Rhythmbox depending on what I'm doing, honestly both go fairly unused most the time. But I like having options, Amberol is more geared towards playlist style music so mixtapes or albums not shuffle all. Whereas Rhythmbox will let me just click my library and go ... both have good integrations to the widget stack in gnome and cinnamon as well as bars like nwg panel and Waybar.
Ooh had a fun though and tested. Musikcube works better in tty mode. So I will sometimes open second users in tty mode with ctrl+alt+f(1-5) or even clone a session into tty mode. and i just checked and cmus doesn't draw the whole screen only whats highlighted. so if you have to drop back to shell or something musikcube is the better option... although i imagine if you're in that situation music players and such are not high on the priority list :/ .
VLC
mpv
I also mostly use VLC these days. I also use it on android, with a copy of my flac library on my microSD there too.
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
Audacious with the Winamp Classic skin. I'm old and it just feels right.
The llamas ass continues to be whipped
dd if=/dev/urandom | aplay
So you like jazz?
Only free jazz
I was about to suggest of=/dev/dsp, but that devnode doesn't seem to be in use anymore
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 :(
That is so true. I never thought about that.
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.
vim
Mom: switch that off!
Kid: I can't!
Emacs
MPD + ncmpcpp, I hate both and I'm yet to find anything better.
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:
When I'm using Windows, I still use foobar2000 for listening to radio streams.
mpd is the best music player on any system
I’ve started using Cantata as a graphical front end, though
I tried several and I very much appreciate Quod Libet
That said I'm interested in trying others' suggestions 👌
VLC
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
Tauon Music Box. I just point it at my Navidrome instance and hit shuffle usually.
I've been using Tauon for years now and I still love it.
I use this with my Jellyfin server, but holy shit has it been wonky. I hit shuffle on my entire library and there's albums it's never even played and other with more plays than other albums combined.
Spotify 🫥
Dies by open-source crowd linching
Tarred and feathered.
With that said I do buy music for my Plex. 🥹
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
Have you heard of spotube?
Spotifyd + spotifytui
VLC
As a bonus: also runs on my phone.
yes, VLC for gui, cmus for cli.
nvlc/ vlc -I ncurses for cli.
Rhythmbox, but this looks really good, 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.
Quod Libet
Still awesome!
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.
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.
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.
YES, foobar2000!
I also gravitated towards Audacious, but I foobar2000 was 10/10. Might consider running it through Wine, since Audacious is not quite there unfortunately
Clementine
Development on Clementine has slowed down considerably compared to Strawberry
Yes but clementine still has features not yet in strawberry.
That's kind of the point.
Clementine originally forked from Amarok 1.4 because Amarok 2.0 changed too much.
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.
Still Clementine for me.
Audacious
With the original Winamp skin.
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 use CMUS because I mainly work within terminal, without a mouse, and the controls feel like Vim
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).
There is no program I miss quite as much as winamp. It really kicked the lama's ass.
Audacious with a winamp skin. Nostalgic.
mpv --no-video --shuffle
mpd
I love Strawberry!
amberol
Feishin, Audacious and Strawberry
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
I must try that. Thanks 👍
When I used Ubuntu, I liked Rhythmbox. I tried Clementine and I also liked it. Nowadays, I use Strawberry on MX Linux. It is similar to Clementine.
Its similar to Clementine because it is a fork of Clementine. https://wiki.strawberrymusicplayer.org/wiki/Differences_from_Clementine
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.
Clementine. I sometimes use the Navidrome web UI too.
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.
Yep. I used Winamp (and still do to an extent) but wanted to find a FOSS alternative that I can start slowly leaning into so it's painless when I migrate to Linux next year. So far, Strawberry is the only one I've found that I enjoy using on a daily basis.
I just use mpv
Since I‘m only listen to music on Apple Music, I use Cider.
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.
Can Strawberry interface with iPods?
Yes
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
Have you tried Lollypop?
It assumes music is organized by albums. No options to view by folder or track.
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.
Strawberry.
Our desktops are almost identical, lol.
mpd + ncmpcpp
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?
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.
Clementine
If you liked Clementine, check out Strawberry. Clementine hasn't been updated since 2016. Strawberry is a fork of the Clementine code base and essentially picks up where Clementine left off.
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.
Strawberry [clementine fork]
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.
+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.
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....
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
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?
I simply play music using mpv.
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.
Clementine
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
Probably a tie between audacious, strawberry, and qmmp