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?
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 👍
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
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.)
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.
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.
Thanks. Just tried it but every time I add one song to the queue, it adds a ton of others to my queue that I did not add. How do I make it stop doing that?
That’s odd, did you go to an artist’s page directly? I just listen to full albums rather than creating a queue so maybe that’s why I didn’t encounter the issue you’re describing.
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.)
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.
Very possible. I like how Jellyfin and Plex are like, “We’ll use your collection where it sits and try to figure out show name, season, and episode number from your filename convention!” And it mostly works.
Unfortunately when I installed Jellyfin, it put a lot of metadata in my /var partition, which was low on space. Oops on that one. So I had to shut down Jellyfin and delete the data until I get that situation resolved (that partition needs more space anyway).
…which is pretty ironic considering that the way they do it (at least in Jellyfin) is extremely limited and for some reason they don’t use the file metadata. Like, I already have all the music metadata correct. So use that, not some fucking filename.
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.
You can do all of that with most basic file explorers. I use Dolphin on KDE. Change the view to “details” and right click the top and choose which metadata fields you want to show up. Then you can sort or filter using metadata.
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
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.
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.
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 💀
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.
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