What's your favorite music player on Linux?
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?
VLC
mpv
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.
I am but a simple man. All my music is FLAC. It is arranged neatly in folders. I just want to select an album to play. I do not need album covers, playlists, search, streaming, tags, lyrics, analyzers, or scrobbling.
Agreed, with the exception of album covers. I like it all to look nice on my Hidizs when I'm on the go.
Sometimes I poke around Wikipedia and see what other artists collaborated with, influenced, or were influenced by artists I like, and buy their albums.
Sometimes I download highly-rated shows from random artists on Internet Archive's Live Music Archive
Sometimes friends recommend stuff.
More of a gmpc kinda person. Unless there's a better GUI for mpd out there?
There's always mpdas for scrobbling
Audacious with the Winamp Classic skin. I'm old and it just feels right.
The llamas ass continues to be whipped
dd if=/dev/urandom | aplay
So you like jazz?
Only free jazz
I was about to suggest of=/dev/dsp, but that devnode doesn't seem to be in use anymore
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 :(
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.)
That is so true. I never thought about that.
Also the hotkeys are terrible, I really really want to use it properly, but those shortcuts are horrid.
vim
Mom: switch that off!
Kid: I can't!
Emacs
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:
When I'm using Windows, I still use foobar2000 for listening to radio streams.
I tried several and I very much appreciate Quod Libet
That said I'm interested in trying others' suggestions 👌
VLC
DeaDBeeF Player, I like lightweight and simple music players.
My fave too as it's closest to foobar, critically with the tagging interface I prefer. Have you added any additional plugins to your install? I tried adding a few (music library, Discord Rich Presence) but must be the right sort of stupid not to understand the instructions. facepalm
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.
Spotify 🫥
Dies by open-source crowd linching
Tarred and feathered.
With that said I do buy music for my Plex. 🥹
It's the one I use most, even though it sucks. I like that I can control it with my phone
Spotify (adblock) from the AUR 😈
No ads & you can still login to your account
Have you heard of spotube?
Spotifyd + spotifytui
yes, VLC for gui, cmus for cli.
nvlc/ vlc -I ncurses for cli.
As a bonus: also runs on my phone.
Rhythmbox, but this looks really good, 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.
Quod Libet
Still awesome!
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.
Tidal sucks for EDM. Trance and progressive in particular.
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.
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
Clementine
Development on Clementine has slowed down considerably compared to Strawberry
That's kind of the point.
Clementine originally forked from Amarok 1.4 because Amarok 2.0 changed too much.
I was using Clementine for a long time and switched to Strawberry about a year ago. Since they're related, migrating libraries from one to the other was also possible.
Still Clementine for me.
I use CMUS because I mainly work within terminal, without a mouse, and the controls feel like Vim
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.
Audacious with winamp skins, weening off windows' foobar2000 as an old favorite, jellyamp, amberol occasionally
Check out Deadbeef, it looks like it might be what foobar was on windows (at least partially).
There is no program I miss quite as much as winamp. It really kicked the lama's ass.
mpv --no-video --shuffle
I love Strawberry!
mpd
Elisa for when i want my whole music library (it is a bit lacking in features tho), audacious w/ winamp classic skin (vibes) when im just playing files on my kde plasma box, and cmus on my qtile setup :3 also sicmuplayer on android cuz its the best
This person has visualisers and I'm here for it.
amberol
Lollypop. Simple interface that shows me album art. I can't always remember band names or artist names but I know what the damn album cover looks like 👍
Agreed.
The feature I like the most in Lollypop is the party mode. It lets the user select various music genres from your library and it plays songs that match the selected options
I must try that. Thanks 👍
Feishin, Audacious and Strawberry
When I used Ubuntu, I liked Rhythmbox. I tried Clementine and I also liked it. Nowadays, I use Strawberry on MX Linux. It is similar to Clementine.
Its similar to Clementine because it is a fork of Clementine. https://wiki.strawberrymusicplayer.org/wiki/Differences_from_Clementine
About 2 years ago, I moved my music to Jellyfin and have been using their media players on every platform I use (iOS, FireTV, Ubuntu, and Windows). At this point my music library is close to 200 GB, kinda hard to store that much on every device I own.
Strawberry is also great if you are on windows as well. I support it in general, whether you use it on Windows or Linux. I've been using it whenever I want to listen to my music on my windows machine. Definitely gonna be using it with my next Linux machine (that isn't my absolute dogshit laptop). Before learning about Strawberry, I was just using Foobar2000 or VLC, which both just don't feel anywhere near as good to me than Strawberry.
Yep. I used Winamp (and still do to an extent) but wanted to find a FOSS alternative that I can start slowly leaning into so it's painless when I migrate to Linux next year. So far, Strawberry is the only one I've found that I enjoy using on a daily basis.
Yeah, put me down for Strawberry too. I used to use Rhythmbox up until mid 2023, I started to get into high res music and I got a tidal subscription, so switched to Strawberry.
Can Strawberry interface with iPods?
Yes
I just use mpv
Since I‘m only listen to music on Apple Music, I use Cider.
Clementine. I sometimes use the Navidrome web UI too.
Nothing honestly. Couldn't find a music player that doesn't look like a file manager, has good search and queue features and doesn't make strong assumptions about how music is organized. Tried to run Musicolet through waydroid but it doesn't support Nvidia gpus
Have you tried Lollypop?
It assumes music is organized by albums. No options to view by folder or track.
mpd + ncmpcpp
For the most part I use ncmpcpp with mpd, but sometimes whenever I just want to listen to a single file I use mpv --no-video instead....
I stream from my Navidrome server, Supersonic is great.
+1 for navidrome running on my nas
I use the navidrome server and web player on my Linux os and my phone.
You use supersonic to connect to navidrome as the front end? Any advantage?
No one really. I've tried a bunch but never found one that felt just right. Clementine is the one that gets the closest.
I really wish MusicBee had a Linux port, it's the only thing I miss from Windows.
Clementine
If you liked Clementine, check out Strawberry. Clementine hasn't been updated since 2016. Strawberry is a fork of the Clementine code base and essentially picks up where Clementine left off.
I love MusicBee. Was browsing through this post to see if anyone recommended anything that is similar to it, but still nothing.
Man, I miss MusicBee, it was a beast. I wish it was on Linux.
Strawberry.
Our desktops are almost identical, lol.
MPD + Cantata
For the most part I just lump all my music into one playlist regardless of album or genre, but day to day I also use several different computers, and I find MPD to be the best for syncing configurations across all of them. Cantata also allows me to see album artwork and track information really easily and has good touchscreen support compared to terminal-based MPD clients.
+1 for Cantata! Although it's not maintained, there's really nothing missing from it. It's complete as it is! Plays anything and you can also have your podcasts and web radio stations in it.
VLC because it works with everything and it doesn't try to organise my music collection for me.
Yeah why the fuck does everything have to organize your collections?
I use Darktable for editing pictures; I have my own organization system and do not need Darktable's help with that...why does Darktable feel the need to be my collection organizer, too? (Because other photo editing programs do it, that's why, and apparently some people do use that feature. I just don't need it.)
Because unlike your file manager both Darktable and any decent music player can work with file metadata in addition to the actual files.
And why do they do it? Because most people like to use it that way - instead of painstakingly making sure your files are in the correct folders (and then being fucked when you want to play anything that's not sorted like that - say, you have everything by artist and album, but now you want to play everything by a specific genre; or in image editing you want to filter by how you rated that picture so you know which one to pick for an edit).
Not everyone needs that, sure. But most people appreciate it - especially if the software does it well.
It just adds another layer of abstraction when my file manager works just fine. I think it started back in the iPod days, and now you have a generation of people who don't know how to manage files.
Strawberry [clementine fork]
lightweight media server Super fast indexing. Smooth web client. Also supports the subsonic api. I've been using the web client locally for some years now. I can also access my library on the go with substreamer on Android which is great. https://github.com/epoupon/lms
How do you get dark mode in Strawberry under KDE? I remember trying to follow some guides and not having much luck. But that was a long time ago at this point. Does this "just work" now?
Should just work with the defaults but check these settings:
Thanks! I checked and actually, dark mode was already on. Huh. I guess I haven't tried since...I don't even know. Maybe I didn't have qt6 installed last time?
Probably a tie between audacious, strawberry, and qmmp
Clementine
I simply play music using mpv.
Clementine
Rythmbox. Syncs to my iPod Classic.
I wish RhythmBox can sync with my iPhone so I don’t need to rely on expensive or semi working MP3 Player app on App Store to listen to music
My distro came with Rhythmbox and I've pretty much just stuck with it. It does podcasts and radio which I appreciate and I can also edit track metadata in it. For playing music from my file browser I use MPV because it's fast.
mpd + Emacs frontend. There are dozens of us
Strawberry if I had to have something visual with buttons.
cmus right now because it loads my rather large library in a split second. mpd works great as well.
More important than the player for me is sorting, though. Beets is my saviour. I could never sort the 5 or 6 albums I get by hand and tag them by hand.
I used to like deadbeef as well, quod libet is great. There really is something for everyone when it comes to something for music. If only there were as many great email clients.
Rhythmbox
Going to ask here, anyone know a music player that is similar to AIMP? It has no native support, unfortunately.
I'm also curious if anyone has any recommendations on this. I've used it for so many years that it's hard to switch to anything else! I've just been running it through Lutris on my main computer.
Dopamine 3 is the closest to AIMP as far I know. I also use it on Windows.
if I'm using gui on my laptop, then amberol
if I'm using my headless server, then you can't get anything better than mpd
Seconding this. MPD + ncmpcpp + an MPRIS plugin. With the latter I can control the music playback through global keyboard shortcuts and the system tray UI if necessary.
VLC when I'm listening to local files, ncspot for Spotify.
I agree with Strawberry. I'd love if Music Bee ever got a linux port or equivalent though
strawberry-qt5 from AUR
Quod Libet is my current favorite. It gives me a lot of the features and layout I used in Foobar2000 in Windows and isn't gigantic.
Strawberry+1
Just mpv for me. Simplest and most versatile option
Elisa, better thank strawberry imo
Sayonara
sayonara is very useful for those who have a large offline library
Amarok 1.4 from TDE
I'm a fan of cmus. simple and easy.
I use Lollypop, I think it is pretty neat and pretty, it also recommends me an album of the day
used to be a rhythmbox guy but I've been using audacious for a few years now
mpdevil! It's got a nice GTK4/Adwaita UI, integrates with mpd, and gets out of your way.
looks interesting
Lollypop and Deadbeef
Ncmcpp, MPV with scripts
I've always just used audacious. It's been good. That said, I recently installed plex amp and the more I used it, the more I like it!
Mpd and Cantata. Deadbeef for playing from a directory or for conversation. I haven't found anything as good as cantata but I have to admit that I miss the monolithic and do everything of musicbee.
Tidal app from AUR and MPD.
I like G4Music, beautiful and straightforward
Rhythmbox and Strawberry are the best, IMO. Rhythmbox has a lower impact on system resources but Strawberry is ideal for people with extensive music collections that you store offline like I do.
Tori. Play music in your terminal. Built in rust and has great performance, and low trace on memory impact.
I settled with Navidrome. It solves 2 use cases for me. Due to being web based it can be used by any PC or mobile device with access to my server. Additionally it supports subsonic which allows me to use a native android app (ultrasonic) and have music on the go. I don't use services like Spotify.
Mpd has always served me well. I use ncccmmmmppp (however its spelled) to manage playlists and such. For album artwork I run sxiv pointed at file in /tmp/. I forget how that part works, actually. I have a grid layout on a second monitor, so I just square up the mpd client and sxiv. Doesn't look too bad.
Semi-related, but as a project I ripped out the pressure/impact pads of an old midi keyboard for use as prev/(pause/unpause)/next buttons, so if the song sucks I can literally punch my desk to skip it.
ncccmmmmppp (however its spelled)
Thanks fish shell for suggesting me the right name with just “nc” ’cause I can’t remember it either
mpg123 file.mp3 >> /dev/null &
I use Sonixd as the frontend to my Navidrome server, and it's the bees knees.
Amberol for its simplicity and esthetics
I used to use Strawberry, but my collection has grown enough that I can't just sync it everywhere, so I use Jellyfin now. I still use Strawberry's library management to move files into album artist/album/00 - track.ext though. Someday I'll dig into id3v2 to just write a script instead.
If you want to continue to use Strawberry, you could stream your music with a subsonic server, Strawberry supports that.
For me it was the other way round: I was using Nextcloud music and searched for a music player on Linux that could stream my .flac-collection via subsonic. That is how I found Strawberry.
Quodlibet
Logitech Media Server, followed by strawberry, quod libet, rhythmbox
Quod libet starts to act funny with 50,000 flac collections. Rhythmbox too. LMS is still chugging at 100k and I can get it on any room in the house, across 2 clients on computers, 2 on raspberry pi and my android phone. If I want to listen to 24/96+, Strawberry can handle it all although I haven't warmed up to the interface. Volumio sucks, it's way too slow.
Just a counter anecdote for others, I haven't had an issue with Quod Libet with over 100k tracks and have been using it for years so YMMV.
I wish MediMonkey was on Linux...
Don't have one I love. Will have to review these comments!
Currently I use the Jellyfin web UI. Usage-wise it's decent, but I don't love using a browser for music.
Previously I was using mopidy + mopidy-Jellyfin + ncmpdcpp but it broke and I never got around to figuring out why. I didn't particularly enjoy ncmpdcpp. Great piece of software, don't get me wrong, just didn't like the TUI music client experience as thought I would.
Checking out GUI based mpd client ecosystem seems like the next logical step.
Sayonara.
Winamp or xmmp/qmmp.
Is there winamp for linux?
Winamp is Winamp for Linux. It runs in wine, but a lot of the visualization stuff requires that you have fully integrated your gpu drivers and wine.
qmmp is very similar.
Tauon Music Box is minimalist and is also probably the best open source Spotify player.
Sometimes I'll just run Spotifyd and control it with my phone.
Tauon Music Box available on Flathub. You look for albums by typing on your keyboard. Once you see the result which says "Artist", hit enter. It creates a playlist which shows all the albums of that playlist. The next time you want to listen to that artist, start typing and select "[Artist name] playlist". This concept differs from a traditional concept of playlists, because it doesn't actually create playlists you can use or export. I just like the UI, although the play controls are bit weird, they don't quite work the way you'd expect them to. It's a new project but worth keeping an eye on.
Schism Tracker
navidrome + ultrasonic
Foobar2000 has been here for YEAAAARS, and I don't think there is a good enough equivalent for linux, and by that I mean playlist tabs, global shortcuts, etc
It's the best. Thankfully it still works just fine under Wine, even if I haven't really bothered to use it there lately.
Dolphin + mpv for me so I can see the album covers and metadata and see whats available, if I have a specific song in mind, then ill just use the terminal and mpv.
I have to say Supersonic.
It's a Subsonic player that integrate with my Airsonic instance in Docker.
It requires a backend like Airsonic, Navidrome etc. It's not a stand alone player.
mpd+mpdevil
I really like Elisa.
I mostly use it to listen to music that's not in my Jellyfin library yet but it does that beautifully.
Plexamp all the way, easily the sexiest music player I've found so far. All my music is FLAC pulled from Deezer, and since I've got a very large list of artists tracked, it's super easy to discover new music with the radio and sonic analysis features. It's also got a last.fm integration, which gives me more data than Spotify would about my listening habits.
The only feature I'm really missing in it is collaborative playlists. I can share playlists out to anyone on my Plex server, but they can't add or remove songs.
Considering that I'm using Emby (selfhost), it's able to manage my music collection too and I can play the music from the web player exposed by it.
Couldn't find any that works for me. At the moment I just play my music in mpv from terminal.
Feishin for me and occasionally strawberry
Mostly CMUS. Clementine on rare occasions.
i use foobar because i can't live without dolby headphone
I just really love mplayer
I use apple music. On linux I use Ciderwhich is amazing. Super clean interface and lots of nobs to turn in order to make everything sound and behave the way I like. If you like apple music or are looking for a streaming solution cider is awesome.
I used to download my music with NewPipe and listen to it on Musicolet, but since then, i just gave up and got a cracked spotify client
Is there a winamp clone?
Audacious with Winamp classic skin
qmmp
Yeah I miss the visualizations in clementine, and project M doesn't seem to work for me on my system w strawberry. It loads but it doesn't seem like it's responding to playing music.
Desktop/Laptop: Ncmpcpp + mopidy-mpd + jellyfin-plugin
Mobile: Finamp
Homeserver: Jellyfin
With this setup I'm able to manage and play my playlists on every device.
I just use Navidrome's web client. It does everything I need. DSub on Android.
MOC
Aqualung—does the small set of things I need it to, and is content to operate on files and directories rather than force the creation of a "music library" that doesn't in any way match how I categorize my music (although if you actually want a music library, it can do that). Only issue is that it's still GTK2, which may become a problem within the next few years.
Musicbee with wine! I have never been able to find something that does it all as well as musicbee, and I've tried almost every single linux music player. I have a huge music library, I add a ton of music regularly. I need auto-tagging, i need to be able to sort, filter and search, a very customizable interface, all of the mp3 tags including obscure ones, gapless playback, configurable fade-in/fade-out, etc etc. With the exception of a few little nitpicks like not integrating well with the KDE media widget, and some occasional annoyances with pipewire, everything works great.
mocp
On Windows, I like Plexamp since I can keep all my music on a Plex server and access it whereever. There's a Linux version but I haven't tried it on Linux yet.
Haven't used it in a while but Amberol is simple (all I need) and gorgeous (which I care about).
Spotify-wayland on hyprland. And I also definetly dont have SpotX-bash, a great spotify adblocker installed!
I used to use Amarok, but now I have a subscription to Youtube Music. It gives me a lot of flexibility on running it in a browser or on Android without worrying about syncing.
mpg123 of course
cmus
So fast and satisfying to navigate around
Spotube
Plex or Plexamp with Tidal integration.
Firefox (invidious). Its free, no ads, and I dont have to store files locally.
I have been bouncing between CLI/GUI and several there of. On the CLI side I'm flipping back and forth between cmus and musikcube. I prefer cmus as it seems faster and has vim key motions an commands, but I like the TUI of musikcube better, its just got soo much extra stuff I don't use. I'd love to find a rust rewrite of it that trimmed out the web-server and most of the plugins as I never use them (and yes all you suckless heads I know, I could edit source and rebuild it but... Ain't nobody got time for that).
Another point for these is being able to detach them, both work fine in detached sessions so I can start an album or playlist and just say that's it, back to work. I use Zellij but I imagine using tmux or whatever would work just as well.
Now as for graphical apps I tend to use Amberol or Rhythmbox depending on what I'm doing, honestly both go fairly unused most the time. But I like having options, Amberol is more geared towards playlist style music so mixtapes or albums not shuffle all. Whereas Rhythmbox will let me just click my library and go ... both have good integrations to the widget stack in gnome and cinnamon as well as bars like nwg panel and Waybar.
Ooh had a fun though and tested. Musikcube works better in tty mode. So I will sometimes open second users in tty mode with ctrl+alt+f(1-5) or even clone a session into tty mode. and i just checked and cmus doesn't draw the whole screen only whats highlighted. so if you have to drop back to shell or something musikcube is the better option... although i imagine if you're in that situation music players and such are not high on the priority list :/ .
Fooyin's great so far as a Foobar2k alternative.
I usually listen to music on YouTube when I'm using a computer. When I play my own music, it's from my Plex server with plexamp with a phone. I rarely use the plexamp desktop app.
cmus is my favorite, elisa is my second favorite.
On Android its NewPipe. No ads, free, I can create playlists, and I dont have to store anything local.
Try RiMusic on F-Droid. FOSS front-end to YT Music, like having Premium without a subscription. Aside from some crashing and offline downloads issues, it's great.
I'm a DeaDBeeF fan. i used it on windows and still use it on linux
Foobar2000, which is a Windows application but available as a snap using wine.
I really want to use DeaDBeeF because it is Linux native and has similar customization features (I like big album art, for example), but sadly its library management leaves a lot to be desired compared to Foobar's. I don't want to have to generate a playlist every time I want to listen to an album, nor do I want to have to clear that playlist when I'm done.
I haven't found any other player with even remotely similar customization available.
audacious, AFAIK it's the only one to support vgmstream
First it was Amarok, then Clementine, and now it's Strawberry.
I use Clementine because it lets me rate my songs. Does Strawberry do that? If it does I'll give it a try.
Strawberry is basically a fork of Clementine from when it was abandoned.
Same, though I also enjoyed guayadeque for a period.