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.
Strawberry is basically a fork of Clementine from when it was abandoned.
I had no idea clementine I as abandoned! I wasn’t paying close attention. Time to jump to strawberry
Ditto. It’ll be interesting to see what improvements there are. But mostly I use Shuttle on my phone to listen
Edit: https://wiki.strawberrymusicplayer.org/wiki/Differences_from_Clementine
The only thing dropped that I might have used is artist info.
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.
Agreed, with the exception of album covers. I like it all to look nice on my Hidizs when I’m on the go.
How do you discover new music? I’m the type that listen to the same thing over and over again but I realized even I rely entirely on autogenerated playlists of Spotify.
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.
How do you download your music?
My client doesn’t have to answer that.
Almost got him
If the artist has a way to buy and download from their website, I do that. Otherwise I buy CDs or vinyl and rip them.
This is a great idea.
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 | aplaySo 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.
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.
MPD + ncmpcpp, I hate both and I’m yet to find anything better.
I’m an Emacs graybeard
Emacs does have a music player, emms, which is what I use.
M-x package-install RET emms RETI’m aware but thank you. I’ve tried it before and didn’t like it. Maybe I’ll give it another shot, though I don’t see much benefit in tying my music player to Emacs.
When I’m using Windows, I still use foobar2000 for listening to radio streams.
mpd is the best music player on any system
I’ve started using Cantata as a graphical front end, though
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.
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.
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
VLC
yes, VLC for gui, cmus for cli.
nvlc/ vlc -I ncurses for cli.
As a bonus: also runs on my phone.
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.
