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?
First it was Amarok, then Clementine, and now it’s Strawberry.
Same, though I also enjoyed guayadeque for a period.
I use Clementine because it lets me rate my songs. Does Strawberry do that? If it does I’ll give it a try.
VLC
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.
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.
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.
Audacious with the Winamp Classic skin. I’m old and it just feels right.
The llamas ass continues to be whipped
MPD + ncmpcpp, I hate both and I’m yet to find anything better.
mpd is the best music player on any system
I’ve started using Cantata as a graphical front end, though
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:
- It relies on MPD which is always a PITA to properly configure. Pulseaudio always managed to make it not work on a fresh system. Hopefully with Pipewire it’ll be better.
- The config format make no sense whatsoever. Especially the one with keybindings. It’s so cryptic I just stopped trying to understand it. Again, I’m an Emacs graybeard, to stress it as a point of reference.
I tried several and I very much appreciate Quod Libet
That said I’m interested in trying others’ suggestions 👌
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As a bonus: also runs on my phone.
yes, VLC for gui, cmus for cli.
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.
Are you sure it’s a Tauon issue and not a Jellyfin issue? I can’t say I’ve had it mis-report play counts for me but I use it with Navidrome, not Jellyfin - maybe Jellyfin doesn’t follow the Airsonic API as strictly or something?
Not sure. I’ve got an issue up on the git after I randomly had 30 plays on one song. New album that had been downloaded too.
This is the wonkiest application though. Feels like early Winamp days again.
VLC
Rhythmbox. It was pre-installed on Ubuntu back when I was on Ubuntu, and I kinda just got used to it. Strawberry looks really cool though, 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.
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
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 did something similar except I wrote a C# program and used AvaloniaUI to build a cross-platform GUI. It was a project to learn C#. I have to make some updates to that now that I think about it…
I use CMUS because I mainly work within terminal, without a mouse, and the controls feel like Vim
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.
I gave it a short try just to see if my fav artists are there. Yes. Didnt expect this. Also feels much more serious than spotify. I will see if the algorithm does its job.
Its weird how at first it only displayed music I would never listen to or is not near the artists I selected at the beginning. I guess I need to listen and favoritize them. And wait?..
Edit: It got a bit better over time. But there are a few songs still missing on Tidal 💀
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.
Tidal sucks for EDM. Trance and progressive in particular.