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c/linux · by not_IO@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 145d

The state of Linux music players in 2026

https://crescentro.se/posts/linux-music-players-2026/

nice little blogpost where someone reviews music players

221 points · 53 comments · view on lemmy.world

53 Comments

who@feddit.org · 46 pts · 145d (2 replies)

This was posted here, and criticized, two months ago:

https://programming.dev/post/44731999

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 145d

has it been updated since? i always enjoy talking music players

edit: hey! found my old comment! also some folk i think are my dorks from my old college days maybe i hope? if they're using the same usernames that'd be wild and fun. i wonder if i should break out my old cult username.

djdarren@piefed.social · 6 pts · 144d

Heh, clicked on that and saw my post at the top. That threw me for a second.

As an update, I've since worked out how to get Navidrome working over Tailscale and an Nginx redirect from my VPS, so I now have Feishin installed on several computers, all drawing from the same Navidrome server at home.

It's pretty cool.

blackbrook@mander.xyz · 39 pts · 145d (1 reply)

This doesn't seem exhaustive enough to be titled "the state of Linux music players."

zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 8 pts · 144d

I agree, it's missing so many.

MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.zip · 21 pts · 145d

That screenshot of Strawberry in the blog post really makes it look bad.

Here's a better one...

kbal@fedia.io · 20 pts · 145d (7 replies)

Quodlibet is the one with all the features.

9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 144d

i've always been a "organize everything at the file system level, and just play folders on demand in winamp" type guy... so when i couldn't find a good winamp replacement after switching to linux, i ended up on quod libet and got used to organizing everything via tagging

quod libet was a bit overwhelming at first and forced me to fix a lot of broken tags, but totally worth it.

zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 144d (5 replies)

Agreed. It is my player of choice, though being it is pure Python, it uses a lot of resources for a music player. If I was tight on ram or using a slower CPU, I'd probably go with something leaner.

flameleaf@programming.dev · 1 pts · 144d (4 replies)

What a strange take. When I first switched to Linux in ~2009 I tried a ton of other players. Weirdly, Quod Libet was the only performant option back then. Amarok, Rhythmbox, Banshee, Clementine, etc all chugged to load my library with their UIs freezing for upwards of half an hour before I had something usable. Quod Libet just worked.

Right now it's using 598MB with a music library of ~31K songs.

zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 143d (3 replies)

Mine is running at 1.2GB of ram, but I have... a substantial library

flameleaf@programming.dev · 2 pts · 143d (2 replies)

I did cut back significantly since that initial switch. At one point, I had 1TB of music. Right now it's sitting at ~210MB of mp3s. Quod Libet uses less RAM than Firefox, Thunderbird, or RSSHub, but it is sitting at 4th place on my system.

I don't think there's a way to scale music libraries to these obscene sizes without impacting RAM. Unless you manage it strictly with a file manager and open album folders individually with a lightweight player used only for playback.

zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 143d (1 reply)

I agree that a large library will always heavily increase the ram usage, but Quod Libet is just less efficient in this regard than some others. I still use it as I like it best and it has done the best at filling the niche that foobar2000 did for me in Windows (minus the insane UI customization ability). Being in Python also makes it super easy to extend. It isn't even close to 4th on my system in memory consumption, but my PC does triple duty as it is my dev workstation, media server, and personal PC. I'm actually shocked that RSSHub uses so much! Is that also a case of a large "library" of sorts?

flameleaf@programming.dev · 2 pts · 143d

nodejs + thousands of feeds processed every hour, so I'm gonna go with yes

Firefox is for opening links that appear in Thunderbird with my current workflow, RSSHub generates the vast majority of them

TheTechnician27@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 145d

I like being exposed to new applications, but Elisa should've come up in the author's search as kdePackages.elisa. Especially if you're using KDE (where the Qt UI blends in well), it plainly meets all four of the criteria for inclusion. It's such a major oversight given its popularity.

snoons@lemmy.ca · 10 pts · 145d (4 replies)

I've been using Audacious for years now; it's lightweight and also has no library management but I find I don't really need that. I just point it to any one album on my drive and it plays it.

I have each album saved as a separate 'playlist' which works well for me. I can see people being annoyed with how I have it set up, but I like it this way.

qwank@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 145d

Audacious is the only one I've tried and works perfect for me. Load up my whole library and shuffle!

Rhaedas@fedia.io · 4 pts · 145d (1 reply)

Audacious isn't perfect, but it's far better than the others that I tried. Had been using VLC forever in WIndows, but for whatever reason I kept running into issues that I couldn't resolve, so began a search for alternatives.

The only huge issue I have is when I add more songs to my music directory, I can't refresh the existing playlist. I have to delete and add the directory again. Don't do it a lot, so it's more inconvenience, and everything else works so much better than other alternatives did.

winety@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 143d

Audacious has a Winamp skin, that's enough for me.

Skullgrid@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 144d

it’s lightweight and also has no library management

That's the point for me for Audacious. I don't want to dig through my entire 30+ GB music folder, create a massive index or whatever, load all that shit to memory every time I open the fucking program, just to play one album.

"Oh I want this album"> Drag it in
"Oh I want this discography" > drag it in

The only problem is no multi column tab view, and no drag into empty space/designated zone to create a new playlist.

RedSnt@feddit.dk · 8 pts · 144d (1 reply)

::: spoiler I'm glad Fooyin got an honorary mention, because that's all I need: :::

Update: After reading through many comments, a lot of people mentioned their affinity for foobar2000-style players, and fooyin came up as the most frequent suggestion. I haven’t tested it, but it seems to be very popular. If you want even more options, fooyin comes highly recommended by a lot of people.

robyn@lemmy.org · 1 pts · 143d

The mold spore

swab148@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 7 pts · 144d (2 replies)

I just use Subsonic and stream music from my server sitting literally a foot away

traxex@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 144d

Mood. Love what subsonic has let me do with my music collection. Navidrome, Arpeggi, and music assistant.

dimjim@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 86d

I do this as well lol, although on my phone I go one whimsical step further and offline cache the music from my navidrome server.

recklessengagement@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 143d (2 replies)

Saving this thread for later. Hoping to find something with a wide variety of visualizers

not_IO@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 143d (1 reply)

that would be great! i miss visualizers in music players!

nyan@lemmy.cafe · 1 pts · 143d

The TDE version of amarok still has vizualizer support. Not sure how it is on modern streaming, though.

SigHunter@discuss.tchncs.de · 5 pts · 144d

I only need fooyin

DmMacniel@feddit.org · 5 pts · 145d

As all my music is stored on my jellyfin, and since I like the GNOME-isms, I can't recommend Gelly enough.

https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.m51.Gelly

Lemmchen@feddit.org · 4 pts · 144d

https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Tauon looks cool, though

PeculiarGoat@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 143d

VLC is where it’s at.

boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net · 3 pts · 144d

Interesting! Gapless is the only modern one and it is fine-ish

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 145d (4 replies)

i just want one i can use to sync [only 20 gBs] to my phone, keep my playlists updated, and listen to music. syncing to my phone wirelessly is a big plus, but i am old enough to have two boxes of cables.

bootleg@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 144d (1 reply)

You can just use Syncthing for syncing.

boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net · 3 pts · 144d

But then you need a player on each platform, that works with m3u files

Which is very few, and buggy.

I use "Anrimians Simple Music Player" and Gapless/G4music, but songs are randomly disappearing from playlists. Also you need to usw default directories for the files.

dimjim@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 86d

If you go with a subsonic server like navidrome, you could pair that with something like Symfonium (paid, and only available on google play unfortunately). That's what I do currently, until something better comes along (Tempus is starting to look nice!)

SinTan1729@programming.dev · 2 pts · 144d

I'd recommend using something like Navidrome instead of manually syncing the files.

smiletolerantly@awful.systems · 3 pts · 144d (1 reply)

rmpc is great. But TUI, so not for everyone, I know.

racketlauncher831@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 144d

vlc has a command line mode, cvlc. It's not great TUI program but works.

anorangecatnamedbillie@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 143d

I've been using Elisa music player, a kde app, for a while now. It's relatively simple to use, required no setup and the user experience is pleasant.

I use it to manage my library of a couple thousand songs in lossless formats (about 100GB worth) with no performance issues.

I get music from ripping old CDs or from Qobuz, that lets you download DRM free music after purchasing and album or a subscription

ne0phyte@feddit.org · 3 pts · 143d

I use supersonic with jellyfin.

scttgard@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 144d (1 reply)

I have been using JRiver Media Center for over 20 years, started on Windows and they have a perfect Linux and Mac versions. More options and features than I would ever use. It just works, best player I have ever used.

jriver.com

glibg@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 143d

This looks interesting, I will give it a try one of these days.

My gold standard for audio players is MusicBee because I LOVE the album art view, where if you click on an album it "folds open" the songs without taking you away from the album art view. I couldn't find a Linux player with a comparable feature, and I tried a bunch of them. I wish I wasn't so particular about my music player but it seems everyone is, hence the many different software.

neidu3@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 144d

Where did xmms go, by the way?

JakoJakoJako13@piefed.social · 2 pts · 143d

Mpd+ncmpcpp for almost 15 years here. Album art would be nice but I don't look at my music player long enough to care that much. Its always thrown on a far away workspace.

Yes I tried Kew and Rmpc. Hell I cloned Rmpc and rewrote it from scratch to try and learn Rust. They're both neat projects but not enough for me to switch. Especially Kew. That one requires some reprogramming of the brain. I'm good right now.

solrize@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 145d

Command line mplayer seems fine to me. I have it aliased to "m" for convenience. Playlists work great (just make a shell script to play the songs you want). Need help getting to sleep? Shell script that sets the volume to barely audible, then plays some long instrumental audios. And so on.

communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz · 1 pts · 144d

Nobody is talking about muffon but I think it's very close to perfect.

mlg@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 144d

Still got nothing on Moonshell 2

enbiousenvy@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 144d

I'm still on Rhythmbox but at this point it's a hassle to use something else because the metadata (album name, track id, etc) would break. I used to test Amberol, Lollypop, GNOME music 3 years ago and the metadata requires fixing.

I also kind of care with the vanity number like play counts that is already recorded.

nyan@lemmy.cafe · 1 pts · 143d

Still using Aqualung. However, my only requirements for a player are that it handle local files, handle m3u playlists, and not try to force a "music library" system on me (Aqualung offers it as an option only, which I've been ignoring for something like a decade and a half).

artyom@piefed.social · 1 pts · 144d

I love MusicPod because it looks really nice and also combines local music with internet radio and podcasts, all in 1 app.

SamueruSama@programming.dev · 1 pts · 143d

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