1y ago

Music Players

Hello guys,
I'm looking for a music player, I have checked some wikis but none of those give me their personal opinion of the music players thus I would like to know your experience. Currently I am using musikcube as I just though it would look since since it can use your terminal colorscheme and I have also used Cue.
Anyway, what music player would you recommend for someone who has thousands of songs and wishes to create playlists seamlessly. Thanks in advance

Edit: Gave most of your recommendations a fair shot. In the end I decided to go for MPD + Ymuse since it was exactly what I needed plus Ymuse is gtk so its automatically themed for me. Thank You All Guys!
fair to say I was Ymused....

85 comments

i dont believe in streaming of any kinda, my data is local
- I don't know why but this made me want to play that Windows pinball game like the old times
  
  That space pinball game thing? It's available on Linux, I saw it in the AUR a few months ago.
- Jellyfin, i own my streaming
- It's been downhill since winamp (UI wise).
  
  You can still use Winamp skins on Audacious, like me.
  
  I'm partial to AIMP
- This is what a NAS + Plex/Jellyfin is for.
  
  uhg plex? no way. i cant imagine any self hosters choosing plex

I use Strawberry personally.
- If there's any other Cantata enjoyers reading this thread while feeling sad that it's not maintained anymore, Strawberry is the closest alternative.
  
  I'd been using Cantata for many years but recently switched to Strawberry. It's pretty good, the dynamic playlist feature is the closest I have found to cantata's though it still behaves a bit differently in details which is a bit annoying :/
- The website is quite tight-lipped regarding features. What’s a ‘smart playlist’?
  
  You can set certain filters and it will automatically fill the playlist with tracks matching those filters. For example I have a smart playlist set to contain all tracks that I rated 3 stars or higher.
  
  There are some canned choices like "50 newest tracks".

As any person that lives under a rock I barely blinked and everyone was using streaming services while I kept half of my hard drive full of pirated mp3 and never got to understand why people fell for that trap. I really like MPD, though when it goes yolo it's a pain in the butt to re-configure it.
I used ncmpcpp for like 10 years (or even more, but I can't recall) but only a couple years ago re-discovered ncmpc and liked its minimalism (compared to ncmpcpp, that is). Even wrote a couple stupid patches to change the default progress bar.
But a few weeks ago learned about mmtc. Which is written in rust.
I didn't have rust installed and the 12 GB of RAM weren't enough to compile rust in my Gentoo box so I used this as an excuse to buy more RAM. And then compiled rust and it took a bit more of an hour so I could use this shiny "new" MPD player. Only to discover its so minimal it doesn't have an database update function - the author literally says you have to set a key combination to call mpc to do so.
- My family fell for it, and it is really hard to convince them otherwise.
  
  My family fell for it,
  ?

I found QMMP few years ago. As a fan of Winamp, I haven't looked back yet. QMMP is compatible with Winamp skins too.
- That is nice, tyvm!
- Wow I forgot I once made a DragonBall Z skin for winamp. It's still there :D Blast from the past!!
- thats actually what this is, qmmp

Audacious with winamp skins.
- I was actually looking to use Winamp. Does this skin makes it look exactly like Winamp? How do I get it?
  
  Audacious can correctly read and display winamp skin files (.wsz).
  Get them from archive.org
  97,133 search hits for 'winamp skin' are listed.
  https://archive.org/search?query=winamp+skin
  One of the old classic skins was sketch_skin
  https://archive.org/details/winampskin_sketch_skin
  (Press play)
  
  Dont have it in front of me so instructions might be off, but Audacious can load any winamp skin you download, it is available as an option in the customization settings. You might have to drop it into a skins system folder on audacious, but winamp skins are one of the theme options you can pick on audacious. Looks just like winamp but the backend stuff is different (right click menu's, etc.)

Plex and plexamp are quite good. Jellyfin and finamp too.
- Jellyfin has mobile and desktop clients.
  For me for a long time it was a coin toss between Plex and Jellyfin.
  For some long forgotten reason I ended with Emby and eventually migrated to Jellyfin as its true free open source fork.
  With jellyfin DLNA server i can play same music on Apple TV, etc. although DLNA clients are certainly not as nice as native apps. One can offset problem with playlists.
  Both have quick start wiki pages like this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Jellyfin
  Official documentation: https://jellyfin.org/docs/

I'm a huge fan of LMS (Lyrion Music Server, formerly Logitech Media Server, formerly Slimserver, formerly...)
Fantastic piece of software. The server can run on a first gen Raspberry Pi and handle 100k+ tracks like it's nobody's business

I'm a big fan of MPD since it runs in the background and can be remote controlled from other devices in the house. Also supports every format under the sun up to and including chiptunes. May or may not be useful to you though.

I'm using Clementine for now it has nice management features, it's overall pretty great. Only downside is that some minor gestures are broken and the UI is not really pretty '
- I would personally recommend Strawberry if anything since development of Clementine has been dead for a long while now, whilst it’s also of fork of Clementine too with frequent updates.
  
  Oohhh i'll surely check this out ! Thanks ! (I prefer strawberrys to Clementines anyway)
- yep, it does not have the looks. hehe, seems alright to me though.
- I've been using Clementine because it's the only one I've found that lets me (easily) rate my songs. But I can always check out others if they can do that. I wish I could find one where the lyrics loaded automatically.

MPD. Is the way. Queue is playlist. Save queue as playlist. Playlist in folder. Load playlist to queue. Load playlist to queue. Playlists con...conc...concatentatetded. Concatenated.

I much like Quod Libet. It has a clean, functional interface to manage your local music collection. Also support for Plugins is nice.
You can create Boolean Logic filters like (played < 10 times AND genre = classical AND composer = Mozart) which I appreciate. And some of the included tools like being able to automatically create meta data tags from file names (for instance
<artist>
-
<album>
-
<track>
.mp3).
It's the best replacement for Music Bee (Windows only) that I've come across.

No one commenting on your playlist? You're cathartic music experience is showing :)
- oh man, that not even my "Today I'm feeling overwhelmed by my emotions so I cue my emotional playlist till I figure out a rational plan" But thanks anyway :)

i like cmus.

Lollypop, it's a bit dated in terms of design for a GNOME app but it has all the features you could want. Can't comment on playlists though, I have never used playlists and honestly don't get the point of them.
- I was like you, did not get the point of playlists until I got into techno and some other genres that most people would consider "trashy". Plus there are some collections of Movies/Games that fit nice into a playlist. Anyway, thanks for the recommendation, I will check it now :) .

i selfhost navidrome and use feishin on linux desktop, and symfonium on mobile.

Currently running Navidrome on my server and using substreamer on mobile, with the webui on desktop.

i use moc because the command line aesthetic

installed foobar2000 with wine. nothing can ever beat it. and i has to have dolby headphone.
- I have always loved FB2K, but I didn't like using it in linux. It was slow to start (which is snap's fault) and was tough to get working in a stable state once I started trying to use components that I prefer (probably wine's fault, but who knows).
  
  have you tried the 32 bit version? i noticed the 64 bit can't load plugins

Probably a bit late, but I really like Quod Libet. It is very extensible, runs light, has excellent tagging and filtering, and just feels similar enough to how I set up my foobar2000.

I'm a big fan of Plexamp.

If you use a DAC, I can recommend Strawberry for the USB to DAC support.
- What does strawberry different in such case?
  
  Its the Hi-res direct output to your DAC. Its under Settings - Backend. It's Clementine reworked to allow this. If you don't use a DAC in your setup, there is no real advantage.

I tried quite a few. ncmpcpp was cool, but I settled on using plexamp since I can use it on phone and desktop. I've been super happy with it, and they made it free a while back. So now my friends use it too and we can share our Plex music libraries.

For some reason I use YouTube music most of the time.
Vlc would be my choice for local. And maybe a jellyfin for my server.

I've tried a few and settled on Audacious.
It's pretty basic overall but it allows you to use original Winamp skins which I love!

You might want to have a look at https://beets.io
- Seems like it could be useful for managing huge libraries
  
  Yeah that's what it's for. And generating playlists and what not. Won't solve you player question per say, but it sounds like what you're looking for still.

- Hehe thanks. I download huge playlists and then listen to them offline because hate to wait for music to play, specially on Holidays. I recommend SimpMusic for you, lets you use Youtube Music privately with no ads and download music with no restrictions. As for how I download my music.... my lawyer told me no to answer that.
  I was born in 1996 but I feel you man, we used to share music with Infrared on those SonyEricssons and Nokias and then bluetooth.
  
  piracy is encouraged on the fediverse (except for .world cause they're nerds). it's ok to say you pirate your music, say it loud and proud
  
  I was born in 1996 but I feel you man
  JFC, how to make me feel old AF, 1966 here .
  I don't stream anything.
- Same, I just use Spotify, or Plexamp for anything on my own server.

Better search, I remember someone asking the same question recently. If I remember correctly, the general consensus was mpv + different frontends.

I use Plexamp on my phone, but I use ncmpcpp and mpd on my towers and laptop. I think both players suite my purposes well.

Personally, I use cmus, though I've been looking around for alternatives also, just to see if there's something better for me. My main issue with cmus is having to build playlists within it, instead of using m3u files. This means I have to back up both my regular playlists I use on my phone, and my cmus playlists. But I haven't really found anything as easy to use and intuitive as cmus so far. I used to like deadbeef but I dropped it because it wasn't available everywhere and I wasn't the biggest fan of its interface.
- Biggest gripe with cmus are are the hotkeys, its totally unintuitive and frustrating if you don't use it daily and everywhere. Additional small gripe: no album covers, but thats with most terminal players.
  
  You can change them. It's what I did.

I've been using Dopamine for years. Nothing ever got even close to it.

I started using fooyin recently, and it's good enough to have replaced running foobar2000 in WINE for me.
- oh, Its in the AUR... nice!!
- What is the appeal, I understand fb2k was the shit back in the days. But nowadays I want a music player with elegant defaults instead of customization?
  
  Different strokes. If I preferred using software that was just good enough out of the box over something I can customize to my exact liking then I probably wouldn't be using Linux in the first place, or at least not the way I do in general.
  Beyond that, having it be customizable means other people can change it to their liking and share that configuration, and maybe I'd experiment with it and find something I didn't even know I wanted.

I just open my music in mpv lol. Used to use MOC, but I couldn't get it to work with multimedia keys, so I ditched it

Nothing seems to sway me from audacious. Does what it needs to do.

YouTube music in Firefox in a special workspace
I'd love a CLI on it but there don't seem to be any good enough to beat the UX
Can be themed with Stylus

85 comments