Something that wasn't mentioned in the article - if you're coming from Windows and using Foobar2000, you'll want DeadBeeF https://deadbeef.sourceforge.io/
I'm a little surprised that anyone still plays music on their computer. Surely now we've moved into the era where we all have dedicated devices for that. Your phone for 99.9% of people, I'd imagine. And for the audiophiles there's a bunch of very high quality DAPs to pick from.
For local music it's my preferred client as well. I've set mine up to resemble the old iTunes interface, with three panes: artist (left), album (right), and song (bottom), and explicitly configured it to use album artists instead featuring blah blah.
For network-based music Navidrome is very good. A good client for that on desktop is https://github.com/victoralvesf/aonsoku. It's Electron, but I don't mind. Ironically, it was Tauri based until a few months ago and that was much heavier and buggy, which is what people complain about with Electron.
I hated it at first, but gave up and nowadays I feel it's good enough not to change anything. Being Client/Server made it somewhat cool, but it's not cool enough, I want sharded libraries to feel like one (like have my phone pretend it has music only my desktop has and stream/sync seamlessly)
> You might say that owning is more expensive than renting, even with all the price increases. Sure. But I’ve paid for Spotify for ten years, from 2014 to 2024, and that’s a solid 1200€ with the old pricing. At the end, I had nothing to show for it. My carefully curated “library” was not mine - it was held hostage by a company that can up the prices at any point.
This reminds me the blog one would write around 2006. Not the text content, but the pixelated font and pictures of winamp wibe like that.
Myself, I am rather happily using mplayer - without any gui. Initially it was practicality of not leaking memory - like many gtk+ apps would do. Now, it is pure utility.
TBH the only thing I care for (except maybe for playlist management) is gapless playback. There's no word about it, but I constantly find out that the new players do not really care about the gap, while the music I am listening to is always ripped from my personal CDs and they mostly have music continuing on two or more tracks. Why nobody cares about it?
Do you know this feeling when you get towards the High Hopes on The Division Bell and there's this ugly crack in between tracks?
For most of my music listening needs, I self-host SwingMusic and keep it pinned in Firefox. Occasionally I'll open the music files directly with MPV or VLC.
The automatic lyrics fetching and playback sync in SwingMusic is pretty nice. My only complaint is that it doesn't let me do full-collection shuffle. Ideally it would also allow me to do something like "full collection shuffle but only of songs that I have never heard". Sometimes I'll pick up an album because it seems interesting but things happen and I forget that I added it and it might languish without listening to it for months or years.
I'm waiting a bit for this to mature before I try it out, but I've seen that there's a few ongoing projects to analyze your full music collection to do feature extraction and generate smart playlists using AI tools. I'm not sure if it'll pan out but it seems like a fun tool for exploring large music collections and possibly making unexpected connections.
I'm very happy that I mostly listen to electronic music (house & techno in its various forms). The predominant way to listen to that is via DJ mixes and recorded Livesets. This field has always been ignored by the commercial streamers, and there is a culture of uploading sets to platforums such as youtube and soundcloud - where you can easily download (albeit youtube making things more difficult in recent years). Since a set is a minimum of 1hour, you don't care for song search, album art etc. You basically need 5-10 files to have music for weeks.
I'm using audacious on macOS installed via homebrew - it has a winamp-like skin. That was peak audioplayer design.
> Since a set is a minimum of 1hour, you don't care for song search, album art etc.
I do care for song search in sets; has the use of .cue files fallen out of fashion as a solution[1]? Amarok supported .cue files since forever, its descendants (Clementine, Strawberry) probably do too.
1. Insofar as you can handle hundreds/thousands of tracks in your library named `ID` because the song hadn't been titled at the time of upload (or uploader didn't know the title).
Yeah audacious is where it's at. I've never understood why anybody would want to use an audio player that doesn't look like winamp. I even use (a lightly modified version of) the original winamp 2 skin:
https://skins.webamp.org/skin/5e4f10275dcb1fb211d4a8b4f1bda2...
> [regarding spotify] At the end, I had nothing to show for it. My carefully curated “library” was not mine
Not just your library, but your listen history and your playlists. I was very annoyed that I had to pay a 3rd party company to export this data so that I could import it into listenbrainz and navidrome.
Anyway, I manage a homelab (read: a scrapbox ubuntu machine with 64TB of spinning disk attached) with 25,000 songs in it, and upon exiting my last position, spent my therapist-mandated "burnout recovery time" finally using `beet` to organize the damn thing. I still don't really understand beet, but now I have a semi-decent flow for abandoning Tidal: Find new released music on Listenbrainz, download it in Nicotine (filtering for >320). Idly browse a given user's other folders shared in Nicotine while waiting for downloads to see if they have anything else I want. Once done, `beet import /mnt/media/downloads/music2`, go through its flow, add anything to musicbrainz that isn't already in there, wipe the download directory when finished to clear out any cruft, and happily play it on Feishin on desktop (connected to my Navidrome instance).
I'm still sorting the mobile version of this out a bit. "Tempus" on F-droid seems the best Subsonic client, however unfortunately "offlining" music on it doesn't expose those files to the Android system or other apps, so I can only play those files within Tempus itself. That's not such a big deal when I've got my IEMs plugged directly into the headphone jack on my phone (yeah that's right I found a phone in 2026 with a headphone jack: sony xperia), but when I have my usb DAC plugged in, I want to use "USB Audio Player PRO" to bypass the android audio stack, and that can only play audio files it can find in local directories, no subsonic compatibility (but it does have a Tidal integration...). So lately I've tried just downloading playlists and albums from the Navidrome web interface on my phone.
Switching from winslop to linux last year (thanks Satya) I did expect some teething issues. The reality was a bit different than what I imagined: fedora kde the OS is rock solid, but the software choices are a bit lacking. Just finding a good audio player can be a pain, and eventually I settled on some foobar clone fooyin, which while lacking built-in audio conversion mostly does what I want it to.
MacOS however truly takes the cake. An OS that’s great for creative softwate, working with images, video, audio and so on, and every single music player is something designed by aliens and/or buggy and/or missing some basic features. I went through ~five different players just to find one that has a waveform seekbar, eventually finding it in quodlibet, which while somewhat functional fits in the designed by aliens part. Baffling.
Honestly, the best (if you don't mind a TUI) is MPD + a TUI client like ncmpcpp or rmpc. Lightweight, fast and since it is a server, you can control it from outside. You can even output the stream in various format to give be able to play it from anywhere, although if it is having your own self-hosted spotify that you want, just use navimdrome.
Worth noting that most of these GTK4/libadwaita players are going to look out of place on anything that isn't GNOME. If you're on KDE or a tiling WM, Strawberry or one of the Qt-based options will integrate much better
For me peak musicplayer UI is still my customized foobar2000 setup on Windows.
I need a waveform, a playhead, a good browser that can do both metadata based libraries and dumb folders fast and without lagging, a way to build/save/view/load playlists and a way to queue songs.
Most players are just too basic or make the wrong or to many assumptions about my collection. Or the interface is just too cute and dysfunctional for my actual daily use.
This means on Linux I currently use either mixxx or just VLC player, but I surely haven't tested every possible mediaplayer.
None of the current solutions work for someone like me. I have multiple versions of the same album so the UI needs to incorporate labels, catalog numbers, etc. and the playlists need to accommodate disc subtitles and grouping. The only two players that allow me this functionality are both on Windows so there's little available for the collectors such as myself.
This is a very good list, thanks for sharing it. Despite having been on a music player journey like the author, in surprised to see several on the list I've not encountered before. This just tells me that the state of music players on Linux is extremely healthy, and that makes sense, it's the only os where the concept of owning your data exists, so of course time and effort is being spent on this part too.
In the end, for me anyway, I'm only listening to music and I didn't really care too much about what the player looked like, not as much as I thought I would. Even VLC, not mentioned here, is a well functioning music player and will do the job just fine.
Good old VLC couldn't be much simpler (or popular). Audio singles, drag-on. Folders of audio files, drag-on. Whatever's in the window can be easily saved as a named playlist. Including internet radio stations (there are thousands). Sort playlists into folders.
Oh yeah, and also handles almost ALL video formats in the same way.
I'm not thrilled by the music player options on Linux. I've tried many and found most of them awful.
Even the author of this article notes negatives about all of the listed players, which I find unacceptable (except for Recordbox, I'll have to look at that). And these are their favorites out of 200 players!
It's the typical problem of free software: bad UI.
I use Music on macOS (disable the music store and it's fine) and have used Rhythmbox on GNOME (passable).
Still looking for something good on Linux.
List from the post, with the author's own criticism:
Amberol
This barely fits my criteria for features … no library management
Euphonica
you will also need to set up MPD … The UI chokes … wish it had a song search function … changing the volume requires using my scroll wheel on the volume knob
Feishin
You will need a music server … Electron app
Lollypop
the user experience is painful
Plattenalbum
you will need to bring your own MPD … cannot even see a list of all albums
Strawberry
less intuitive than I’d like it to be … giant translucent strawberry in the middle of my screen at all times
Tauon
“everything-is-a-playlist” approach … overwhelming and confusing … stretched icons … scroll bar is on the left of the window for some reason
> It's the typical problem of free software: bad UI.
> I use Music on macOS
I’m surprised to read this. While I have quite high tolerance for bad UI and don’t have my own opinion, I’ve heard many a Mac / iOS developer practically spit on Music.app design.
95 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/quodlibet/quodlibet
For network-based music Navidrome is very good. A good client for that on desktop is https://github.com/victoralvesf/aonsoku. It's Electron, but I don't mind. Ironically, it was Tauri based until a few months ago and that was much heavier and buggy, which is what people complain about with Electron.
10 years to realize it ? What took so long ?
Myself, I am rather happily using mplayer - without any gui. Initially it was practicality of not leaking memory - like many gtk+ apps would do. Now, it is pure utility.
https://audacious-media-player.org/
On the music management side of things, I always feel like files and folders are the way to go.
Do you know this feeling when you get towards the High Hopes on The Division Bell and there's this ugly crack in between tracks?
The automatic lyrics fetching and playback sync in SwingMusic is pretty nice. My only complaint is that it doesn't let me do full-collection shuffle. Ideally it would also allow me to do something like "full collection shuffle but only of songs that I have never heard". Sometimes I'll pick up an album because it seems interesting but things happen and I forget that I added it and it might languish without listening to it for months or years.
I'm waiting a bit for this to mature before I try it out, but I've seen that there's a few ongoing projects to analyze your full music collection to do feature extraction and generate smart playlists using AI tools. I'm not sure if it'll pan out but it seems like a fun tool for exploring large music collections and possibly making unexpected connections.
I'm using audacious on macOS installed via homebrew - it has a winamp-like skin. That was peak audioplayer design.
I do care for song search in sets; has the use of .cue files fallen out of fashion as a solution[1]? Amarok supported .cue files since forever, its descendants (Clementine, Strawberry) probably do too.
1. Insofar as you can handle hundreds/thousands of tracks in your library named `ID` because the song hadn't been titled at the time of upload (or uploader didn't know the title).
Honorable mention to qmmp, too.
Not just your library, but your listen history and your playlists. I was very annoyed that I had to pay a 3rd party company to export this data so that I could import it into listenbrainz and navidrome.
Not to mention there's a song that Spotify removed from my "Liked" playlist that to this day I can't quite remember, though I can remember just enough of it to drive me mad: https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/1hklstg/tomt...
Anyway, I manage a homelab (read: a scrapbox ubuntu machine with 64TB of spinning disk attached) with 25,000 songs in it, and upon exiting my last position, spent my therapist-mandated "burnout recovery time" finally using `beet` to organize the damn thing. I still don't really understand beet, but now I have a semi-decent flow for abandoning Tidal: Find new released music on Listenbrainz, download it in Nicotine (filtering for >320). Idly browse a given user's other folders shared in Nicotine while waiting for downloads to see if they have anything else I want. Once done, `beet import /mnt/media/downloads/music2`, go through its flow, add anything to musicbrainz that isn't already in there, wipe the download directory when finished to clear out any cruft, and happily play it on Feishin on desktop (connected to my Navidrome instance).
I'm still sorting the mobile version of this out a bit. "Tempus" on F-droid seems the best Subsonic client, however unfortunately "offlining" music on it doesn't expose those files to the Android system or other apps, so I can only play those files within Tempus itself. That's not such a big deal when I've got my IEMs plugged directly into the headphone jack on my phone (yeah that's right I found a phone in 2026 with a headphone jack: sony xperia), but when I have my usb DAC plugged in, I want to use "USB Audio Player PRO" to bypass the android audio stack, and that can only play audio files it can find in local directories, no subsonic compatibility (but it does have a Tidal integration...). So lately I've tried just downloading playlists and albums from the Navidrome web interface on my phone.
MacOS however truly takes the cake. An OS that’s great for creative softwate, working with images, video, audio and so on, and every single music player is something designed by aliens and/or buggy and/or missing some basic features. I went through ~five different players just to find one that has a waveform seekbar, eventually finding it in quodlibet, which while somewhat functional fits in the designed by aliens part. Baffling.
I need a waveform, a playhead, a good browser that can do both metadata based libraries and dumb folders fast and without lagging, a way to build/save/view/load playlists and a way to queue songs.
Most players are just too basic or make the wrong or to many assumptions about my collection. Or the interface is just too cute and dysfunctional for my actual daily use.
This means on Linux I currently use either mixxx or just VLC player, but I surely haven't tested every possible mediaplayer.
https://cmus.github.io/
For all my fellow terminal friends <3
In the end, for me anyway, I'm only listening to music and I didn't really care too much about what the player looked like, not as much as I thought I would. Even VLC, not mentioned here, is a well functioning music player and will do the job just fine.
Oh yeah, and also handles almost ALL video formats in the same way.
It uses UI idioms and technologies (gtk 3) of its mileage, 2017.
It's the typical problem of free software: bad UI.
I use Music on macOS (disable the music store and it's fine) and have used Rhythmbox on GNOME (passable). Still looking for something good on Linux.
List from the post, with the author's own criticism:
Amberol
This barely fits my criteria for features … no library management
Euphonica
you will also need to set up MPD … The UI chokes … wish it had a song search function … changing the volume requires using my scroll wheel on the volume knob
Feishin
You will need a music server … Electron app
Lollypop
the user experience is painful
Plattenalbum
you will need to bring your own MPD … cannot even see a list of all albums
Strawberry
less intuitive than I’d like it to be … giant translucent strawberry in the middle of my screen at all times
Tauon
“everything-is-a-playlist” approach … overwhelming and confusing … stretched icons … scroll bar is on the left of the window for some reason
I’m surprised to read this. While I have quite high tolerance for bad UI and don’t have my own opinion, I’ve heard many a Mac / iOS developer practically spit on Music.app design.