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.
I would say Arch because the AUR is amazing and Arch all around is so good but you’ll need to be making a lot of decisions during install that you know nothing about. If you want to learn then I think it’s the best overall.
That’s fair enough, I didn’t mean to imply there is anything wrong with it, just that it seems alien to me and my cheapskate ways. I can understand it though, I prefer to use a computer and only really use my phone for browsing but I tend to forget that for some people it’s much more like what I would use a computer for.
They can be dropped into local directories, assuming the devs provide binaries, otherwise they need building. I know it’s not difficult to git clone and build but it’s not really a beginner friendly process and not ideal to have to remember to check for updates (and not ideal to not have them packaged for updates if there are binaries provided by the devs). I was considering using 10 years ago or so and this was one of the main reasons I decided against it in the end (along with other audio tools not having packages), it’s a shame it hasn’t really moved forward in this respect because it looked really nice otherwise.