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.
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.
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
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.
More of a gmpc kinda person. Unless there’s a better GUI for mpd out there?
There’s always mpdas for scrobbling
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.
This is a great idea.
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.
VLC
As a bonus: also runs on my phone.
yes, VLC for gui, cmus for cli.
nvlc/ vlc -I ncurses for cli.
I tried several and I very much appreciate Quod Libet
That said I’m interested in trying others’ suggestions 👌
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
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).
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.
I gave it a short try just to see if my fav artists are there. Yes. Didnt expect this. Also feels much more serious than spotify. I will see if the algorithm does its job.
Its weird how at first it only displayed music I would never listen to or is not near the artists I selected at the beginning. I guess I need to listen and favoritize them. And wait?..
Edit: It got a bit better over time. But there are a few songs still missing on Tidal 💀
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?
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.
Tidal sucks for EDM. Trance and progressive in particular.
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:
- 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 RET
I’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.
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
Quod Libet
Still awesome!
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
I use CMUS because I mainly work within terminal, without a mouse, and the controls feel like Vim
- Cmus.
- mpg123 4 internet radios.
- FFplay | mpv.
- zxtune.
- Years ago: moc or deadbeef (because foobar2000).