What's your favorite music player on Linux?

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

VLC

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.

Audacious with the Winamp Classic skin. I'm old and it just feels right.

dd if=/dev/urandom | aplay

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.

vim

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

I tried several and I very much appreciate Quod Libet

That said I'm interested in trying others' suggestions 👌

VLC

Spotify 🫥

DeaDBeeF Player, I like lightweight and simple music players.

VLC

Tauon Music Box. I just point it at my Navidrome instance and hit shuffle usually.

Rhythmbox, but this looks really good, I may have to give it a try

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.

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).

Quod Libet

Clementine

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

Audacious

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

Audacious with a winamp skin. Nostalgic.

mpv --no-video --shuffle

I love Strawberry!

mpd

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 👍

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

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.

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.

amberol

Feishin, Audacious and 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.

I just use mpv

Qmmp

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.

Clementine. I sometimes use the Navidrome web UI too.

Since I‘m only listen to music on Apple Music, I use Cider.

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

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....

mpd + ncmpcpp

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.

I stream from my Navidrome server, Supersonic is great.

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.

Strawberry.

Our desktops are almost identical, lol.

Strawberry [clementine fork]

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

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?

Probably a tie between audacious, strawberry, and qmmp

Clementine

I simply play music using mpv.

Clementine

Rythmbox. Syncs to my iPod Classic.

mpd + Emacs frontend. There are dozens of us

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

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.

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

Amberol is great

Rhythmbox

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

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

strawberry-qt5 from AUR

Strawberry+1

Amarok 1.4 from TDE

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.

Just mpv for me. Simplest and most versatile option

I'm a fan of cmus. simple and easy.

Sayonara

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

G4Music

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.

Elisa, better thank strawberry imo

Tidal app from AUR and MPD.

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!

Ncmcpp, MPV with scripts

I use Lollypop, I think it is pretty neat and pretty, it also recommends me an album of the day

I like G4Music, beautiful and straightforward

Rhythmbox and Strawberry are the best, IMO. Rhythmbox has a lower impact on system resources but Strawberry is ideal for people with extensive music collections that you store offline like I do.

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

Lollypop and Deadbeef

Rhythmbox. Works too well. I grew out of the Winamp/Audacious thing.

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.

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

mpdevil! It's got a nice GTK4/Adwaita UI, integrates with mpd, and gets out of your way.

https://github.com/SoongNoonien/mpdevil

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tauon Music Box is minimalist and is also probably the best open source Spotify player.

Sometimes I'll just run Spotifyd and control it with my phone.

mpg123 file.mp3 >> /dev/null &

I use Sonixd as the frontend to my Navidrome server, and it's the bees knees.

I wish MediMonkey was on Linux...

Sayonara.

Amberol for its simplicity and esthetics

Winamp or xmmp/qmmp.

Quodlibet

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

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.

mpd+mpdevil

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

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.

I just really love mplayer

i use foobar because i can't live without dolby headphone

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.

Feishin for me and occasionally strawberry

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.

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.

navidrome + ultrasonic

Schism Tracker

Mostly CMUS. Clementine on rare occasions.

Spotifyd

Is there a winamp clone?

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.

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

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.

cmus

So fast and satisfying to navigate around

Emms, an emacs package.

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.

cmus is my favorite, elisa is my second favorite.

Spotube

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.

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

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.

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.

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

MOC

Plex or Plexamp with Tidal integration.

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.

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.

mocp

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!

mpg123 of course

I'm a DeaDBeeF fan. i used it on windows and still use it on linux

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

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.

audacious, AFAIK it's the only one to support vgmstream