Recently switched to Linux and have been looking for alternatives for Musicbee, which I used for ages in Windows. I guess I could make it work with Wine but thought I’d ask here for suggestions first. Features I’m looking for are not a lot to ask IMO:

  1. Music folder can be anywhere, not only ~/Music
  2. In the list of songs by a given artist, I can sort by album year, but the tracks within each album stay in the correct order
  3. The player remembers where I left off the next time I open it

I’m using Rhythmbox and it’s great but unfortunately it doesn’t do #3 (if I missed some setting let me know please).

Thanks in advance!

Edit: Best options from the comments were Strawberry and Quod Libet. I think I’ll go with Quod Libet. Thanks all for the suggestions.

  • lattrommi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    6 months ago

    Quod Libet can do 1 and 3 for sure, I think it can do #2 but I’m not positive. I don’t have a music collection with very many albums that have multiple tracks. You can pick and choose which metadata columns show up for your library and sort by whatever you want, including creating your own but that’s outside my expertise. It can do bulk renaming too.

    I was using Clementine for awhile, then because of a lack of updates and some other minor issues, I switched to Strawberry which is a fork of Clementine. It added some neat features but lost a few too. After using a dozen or so different players, I found Quod Libet just works like I want it to.

    The way I listen to music is to dump all my files into a single folder called “music”, then do shuffle, repeat all. I was in the process of moving my files to a new storage and moved the folder around a few times. Just had to update the library with a scan, took like 10 seconds.

    I also have it set up to automatically resume playing from where it left off. One of the options is then queue autosave interval, which does the resume from where you left off. It’s enabled by default I believe. You can set it to autosave every second if you want but to use less system resources, I stick with the default of 60 and I think it saves on shutdown/restart too. I’ve never noticed it NOT resume from where I left off.

    It has a plugin system to add features but otherwise it starts off very bare bones. You add plugins to basically build your own player the way you want it. That means it can be a bit of work to initially setup. While that sounds like a pain, the amount of time I’ve spent in Quod Libet’s settings is a tiny fraction of the amount of time I spent messing with Clementine and Strawberry’s options, as well as other players. It’s probably the music player I’ve seen the GUI for the least in my entire life, as a ratio to how much music I’ve listened to with it.

    • golden_zealot@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6·
      6 months ago

      Speaking of Quod Libet, Ex Falso from them is still the best way to fix meta data on music that I have found - so very very handy.

    • reboot6675@sopuli.xyzOP
      2·
      6 months ago

      Quod Libet looks great, thanks! Probably going to go with this one. Looks pretty similar to Rhythmbox and also does #3 from my list

  • Brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    6·
    6 months ago

    Pretty sure Strawberry does everything you are looking for.

    re: #1 I kind of had the same issue but with multiple music folders, most of the default music apps only let you use one folder. Strawberry lets you add as many music folders as you like, I’ve been happy with it.

    On Windows I used to use foobar2000 which was great, and in theory I could get it running under Linux, but I’d rather just use something coded for Linux compatibility from the start.

    • banazir@lemmy.ml
      3·
      6 months ago

      Man I do miss foobar2000, it was a perfect all-in-one package that did things I need multiple Linux programs for. Great piece of software. However, in the spirit of this community, it’s not Open Source.

      • Brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        3·
        6 months ago

        There is an Linux compatible open source player being developed called fooyin (https://fooyin.org/) heavily inspired by foobar2000. When I tried it out a few months back it was still a bit rough for day-to-day use but it could eventually become a good alternative for people that miss the foobar2000 style player.

  • MrSulu@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    6 months ago

    I’m currently using Strawberry. Before that Deadbeef (was perfectly happy with Deadbeaf, just tried something different). MPD with Cantata was on the cards but not got to it yet.

  • dragnucs@lemmy.ml
    1·
    6 months ago

    Rytgmbox does not do your feature number 3, my personal workaround is to, before closing the app, add the current song to the play queue, so it will be picked up next time you start the application.

  • solrize@lemmy.ml
    1·
    6 months ago

    Someone mentioned Immich recently and it sounded like the cool kids are using it now, so maybe it’s worth looking into. I’m just a cavedweller and use command line mplayer, but given all the song metadata, the features you mention are pretty easy to do. Is every song necessarily on an album though?