nice little blogpost where someone reviews music players
This was posted here, and criticized, two months ago:
Heh, clicked on that and saw my post at the top. That threw me for a second.
As an update, I’ve since worked out how to get Navidrome working over Tailscale and an Nginx redirect from my VPS, so I now have Feishin installed on several computers, all drawing from the same Navidrome server at home.
It’s pretty cool.
This doesn’t seem exhaustive enough to be titled “the state of Linux music players.”
I agree, it’s missing so many.
That screenshot of Strawberry in the blog post really makes it look bad.
Here’s a better one…
Quodlibet is the one with all the features.
I absolutely adore being able to click into and between genres and artists to get to albums and songs instantly. I want to ultimately move back to MPD, maybe Navidrome or Subsonic, but… I just love Quod Libet.
I love that it has proper search queries: https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/searching.html
Do other players have this as well?And the queries work with custom tags, which can also be added to any element of the UI. It’s so good if you’re ADHD about organization.
I love how I can type things like #(added < 1 week) to search for albums I recently added to my library.
this looks like foobar2k, cool
Agreed. It is my player of choice, though being it is pure Python, it uses a lot of resources for a music player. If I was tight on ram or using a slower CPU, I’d probably go with something leaner.
What a strange take. When I first switched to Linux in ~2009 I tried a ton of other players. Weirdly, Quod Libet was the only performant option back then. Amarok, Rhythmbox, Banshee, Clementine, etc all chugged to load my library with their UIs freezing for upwards of half an hour before I had something usable. Quod Libet just worked.
Right now it’s using 598MB with a music library of ~31K songs.
Mine is running at 1.2GB of ram, but I have… a substantial library
I did cut back significantly since that initial switch. At one point, I had 1TB of music. Right now it’s sitting at ~210MB of mp3s. Quod Libet uses less RAM than Firefox, Thunderbird, or RSSHub, but it is sitting at 4th place on my system.
I don’t think there’s a way to scale music libraries to these obscene sizes without impacting RAM. Unless you manage it strictly with a file manager and open album folders individually with a lightweight player used only for playback.
I agree that a large library will always heavily increase the ram usage, but Quod Libet is just less efficient in this regard than some others. I still use it as I like it best and it has done the best at filling the niche that foobar2000 did for me in Windows (minus the insane UI customization ability). Being in Python also makes it super easy to extend. It isn’t even close to 4th on my system in memory consumption, but my PC does triple duty as it is my dev workstation, media server, and personal PC. I’m actually shocked that RSSHub uses so much! Is that also a case of a large “library” of sorts?
nodejs + thousands of feeds processed every hour, so I’m gonna go with yes
Firefox is for opening links that appear in Thunderbird with my current workflow, RSSHub generates the vast majority of them
I’ve been using Audacious for years now; it’s lightweight and also has no library management but I find I don’t really need that. I just point it to any one album on my drive and it plays it.
I have each album saved as a separate ‘playlist’ which works well for me. I can see people being annoyed with how I have it set up, but I like it this way.
Audacious isn’t perfect, but it’s far better than the others that I tried. Had been using VLC forever in WIndows, but for whatever reason I kept running into issues that I couldn’t resolve, so began a search for alternatives.
The only huge issue I have is when I add more songs to my music directory, I can’t refresh the existing playlist. I have to delete and add the directory again. Don’t do it a lot, so it’s more inconvenience, and everything else works so much better than other alternatives did.
Audacious has a Winamp skin, that’s enough for me.
I'm glad Fooyin got an honorary mention, because that's all I need:
Update: After reading through many comments, a lot of people mentioned their affinity for foobar2000-style players, and fooyin came up as the most frequent suggestion. I haven’t tested it, but it seems to be very popular. If you want even more options, fooyin comes highly recommended by a lot of people.
The mold spore
As all my music is stored on my jellyfin, and since I like the GNOME-isms, I can’t recommend Gelly enough.
I only need fooyin
I just use Subsonic and stream music from my server sitting literally a foot away
Mood. Love what subsonic has let me do with my music collection. Navidrome, Arpeggi, and music assistant.
Mpd+ncmpcpp for almost 15 years here. Album art would be nice but I don’t look at my music player long enough to care that much. Its always thrown on a far away workspace.
Yes I tried Kew and Rmpc. Hell I cloned Rmpc and rewrote it from scratch to try and learn Rust. They’re both neat projects but not enough for me to switch. Especially Kew. That one requires some reprogramming of the brain. I’m good right now.
I used Mopidy for NCMPCPP for Spotify for a few years, that was fun.
https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Tauon looks cool, though
Interesting! Gapless is the only modern one and it is fine-ish
rmpc is great. But TUI, so not for everyone, I know.
vlc has a command line mode, cvlc. It’s not great TUI program but works.
I use supersonic with jellyfin.
Command line mplayer seems fine to me. I have it aliased to “m” for convenience. Playlists work great (just make a shell script to play the songs you want). Need help getting to sleep? Shell script that sets the volume to barely audible, then plays some long instrumental audios. And so on.
