My take on this issue is that this sounds like a Musicbee promotion :p

How can a player that allows you to almost completely design your own UI be “clunky and clumsy”? foobar2000 can be anything from an unscrollable auto-generated playlist of “odd numbered tracks in the deathmetal genre” showing only “stop” and “play” buttons, to a dynamic / responsive UI that auto-scrolls song lyrics in time with the song that’s playing.

If you don’t like it, you don’t like it and that’s fine. Reading “clumsy” and “clunky” used to describe foobar2000 make me wonder what your approach to evaluating music players even is though.

Take this as a suggestion to give foobar2000 a little more time/effort. If you just aren’t into that though, I’d say Clementine is pretty solid.

If you add an edit to your post listing out your requirements, dealbreakers, and maybe giving a little detail on what you didn’t like about the players you listed, you’ll probably get responses that are more helpful :D

I use Clementine, a cross-platform fork of Amarok 1.4, on both Windows and Linux.

I use foobar2000 with WINE and it works for me. I have very minimal requirements for a music player and yet nothing native on Linux can meet them.

I need:

• Smart playlists that can update themselves when files are added to a directory
• Album Shuffle
• Play a random album on demand/hotkey
• Middle click scroll (this is the one that DQs most Linux players. I cannot scroll manually over my giant library. Even scrolling just artists is not feasible with my collection. I sometimes like to scroll around to pick something sort of random but not have to skip album after album with a button)

foobar2000 has had these for like 2 decades and I don’t understand why no one has recreated it successfully. Deadbeef and qoob are not as powerful as they would like to think they are.

It’s been a while since I used it, but my choice on Linux was always Quod Libet, which is a smidge barebones but also really powerful (especially with tagging).

I’m a terminal masochist, so I use fzf combined with mpv.

This needs mpd, tofi, and a nerdfont installed. I bind it to super+m and lets me search and play one album. Nothing else.

#!/bin/bash
menu="tofi"

# create menu items
albumartists=$( mpc list albumartist )
while IFS= read -r albumartist; do
    albums=$( mpc list album Artist "$albumartist" )
    while IFS= read -r album; do
        if [[ -n "$album" ]]; then
            artist_album_list+="$albumartist 󰎈 $album\n"
        fi
    done <<< "$albums"
done <<< "$albumartists"

# offer prompt
selection=$( echo -e "${artist_album_list[@]}" | \
    $menu )

# extract sel_album and sel_albumartist 
sel_album=$( echo "${selection#*󰎈}" | xargs )
sel_albumartist=$( echo "${selection%󰎈*} " | xargs )

# echo $sel_album # testing purposes
# echo $sel_albumartist

# play
mpc clear
mpc findadd artist "$sel_albumartist" album "$sel_album"
mpc play

I just use VLC and organize my music by folders. If I want to listen to a certain album, I go to that folder and have VLC play it.

Linux programs tend not to be monolithic. The power is there but is often split across a few tools rather than being bundled into one. Beets is incredibly good for library management and there are a bunch of good players around, my favourite being mod + cantata. Cantata is not bad for browsing and managing as well, and it lets you set up custom actions so you can open an album in something like puddletag if you don’t want to deal with beets.

Exaile or Clementine?

I use quod libet daily and prefer it over musicbee, it’s got a neat and simple ui with nice plugins

i use elisa for downloaded music, and spotify for online

This is question for each and every open source software ever.

Making new stuff is fun. Polishing it to the point where no one will have problem with it, those last 5-most-boring-percents, is soul sucking.

Do you want music player that someone enjoyed making it? Or you want one where someone that was bored doing it and you don’t even know who that is? (this is first time i heard of musicbee, maybe they had fun and were enjoying making it, but i couldn’t find any name attached to that software. is it just one guy or multiple teams?)

Even if it wasn’t true for musicbee, it is true for most software out there.

when it comes to playing music, i use Amberol. it just queues up songs and plays them, it’s minimal but gets the job done. as for browsing my music collection, i just use my file manager (in my case, Nautilus). editing my tags is a bit trickier. Ear Tag does almost everything i need, but i still have to keep Ex Falso around for track number generation (i’m certain there’s a way to do it in Ear Tag, but i haven’t found it)

Strawberry !!

I still use Cantata even though development has ceased because I haven’t found anything else that I like. I think the general shift to streaming sites has been bad for desktop music players. By the way, does anyone know of an active fork? Would be greatly appreciated.