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I tried out most (if not all) of the music players on flathub, but I always end up going back to Rhythmbox. It's so simple, lightweight, got just enough features (for my use case) and blends well with GTK Desktops (I mostly use Gnome and Cinnamon) and it looks so clean in my Nord theme π
How has your experience with Rhythmbox? do y'all got any alternative you think everybody should give a try? I personally think Elisa is a close second!
TIL rhythmbox still exists.
I've been a Linux user since 2005ish and a DJ since at least 2013. I've tried a lot of music players including Rythmbox. I settled on Clementine/Strawberry or Amorok, depending on use case. Haven't used either of them recently.
With that said, there is no right answer. Find one you like!
Absolutely classic music player. The iTunes 1.0 UI pattern, which was pre-enshittification. To my eyes, I still donβt think Iβve ever seen a more overall efficient and descriptive way of browsing a local music library.
Awww... iTunes is that bad now? Man....last time I used iTunes was probably 2010 or so. Bummer.
I'm just going to use this opportunity to publicly grieve again for Winamp fake becoming open-source: https://hackaday.com/2024/10/16/winamp-taken-down-too-good-for-this-open-source-world/
I like Strawberry, for two reasons:
It was the first player I found that supported playing directly to a pipewire sink, without going through the Pulseaudio compatibility layer.
It can stream hi res FLAC files from Tidal.
I prefer Quod Libet but I have fond memories of rhythmbox.
Fooyin is also a solid choice.
the UI kinda looks like a QT based Rhythmbox. I'll give it a try later π
It is heavily inspired by foobar2000, one of the GOAT under windows IMHO.
I just went on a journey looking at different local music players.
Just tried Rhythmbox. It's not terrible, but not great either. It looks very bare bones.
Of the ones I've tried, I like Elisa the best. I spent a ton of time getting HQ artwork and quality metadata on my files and Elisa really shows that off. Rhythmbox barely shows any artwork. I just have two complaints about Elisa. First, Qt apps just don't feel right in Gnome for various reasons: fonts are often too thick, icon contrast is bad, and Qt theme is weird for non-Breze. It also has weird scrolling behavior: it has forced scrolling smoothing and acceleration.
Runner up is Sayonara. It's Qt based, but actually feels decent in Gnome. Overall I like the UI more than Elisa, but unfortunately it doesn't handle showing my library as well. Artwork is duplicated (it shows albums multiple times if songs in them have different years) and some artwork is inexplicably missing.
Just felt the need to say our music libraries look very similar. You have great taste.
Rhythmbox has been my main music app for over 15 years now. Every now and then I'll check out other options but I always end up back after a couple days.
I do wish they would give the UI some attention. Nothing major, just a few visual tweaks to bring it inline with modern Gnome (the alternative toolbar plugin is really close)
It still can't sort or browse by album artist, which makes it a real pain to use. You have to apply a patch and compile it from source to make it usable.
I like cmus best. It is both as simple and as complicated as I need it to be.
It's an amazing music player and shit podcast app
I use mpd and ncmpc++, myself. My library got too large (Just shy of 70,000 songs now) and all the GUI players choke and freeze when I try to scan my library, including Rhythmbox and QuodLibet. I'm kind of interested in how inori develops, since ncmpc++ isn't getting any active development beyond fixing bugs when things break with updates, but I'm also pretty happy with it for now.
It literally hasnβt changed even a tiny bit since I first saw it in 2006 :)
I currently use Strawberry - a well maintained fork of the old Amarok player before they redone the UI for KDE 4. It does what I care the most:
mpd for me
i can't leave foobar2000 until i find something that has dolby headphone π₯² and it's sometimes wonky in wine
I used it on Mint. I liked it. I use Strawberry now because it can bypass software decoding and output audio directly to my DAC.
I just looked up the initial release, it was in August 2001. I don't remember the first time I used it, but it was probably 20 years ago. Still remains my favourite for the reasons you mentioned.
I also use Rhythmbox, the UI is clean and simple. Other music players either are too complicated (UI has too much clutter, play queues) or want to automatically import all audio files in my home directory into the library, which is annoying. But to be fair, I haven't tried a lot of other players, because I'm happy using Rhythmbox.
My only complaint with Rhythmbox is that it lets you close it while playing a song and then the ui is gone but the song keeps playing. Insanity!
Command line mplayer has been plenty for me.
Love Rhythmbox! I used it way way back when I first installed Ubuntu (back when it was good) and it was part of a special nostalgic feeling of having been ushered into this new linux world, and I think it lets you rate your songs 1-5 stars (if you want) and I had a lot of fun doing that.
You can have a look at this superb list for you to test other softwares : https://www.linuxlinks.com/best-free-open-source-music-players/
Tauon is really, really great. But because it is not the most stable on my system (arch) I mainly use Strawberry which is also great.
I use audacious with a winamp skin.
Been liking Amberol lately, but it's extremely simple. Nice UI though.
I enjoyed it at first, but it was too simple for my personal use. What it lacked the most for me was a playlist management, I didn't find any option for that feature
can anyone suggest a tool to re-assess all my ripped mp3s and flacs with artist/track title info? I ripped ages of music from CD, and at some point a lot of the data got dicked up.
Musicbrainz picard has an option to tag files based on acustic fingerprinting
For a second, I misread this and thought Rockbox had a desktop port.
Never heard of it, but looks like a cool project!
Clementine was the best
I use strawberry now, which is a clementine derivative. Having my library in one column on the side and just pulling stuff from the library to a variable custom playlist is my preferred player style. Exaile is also like this, and deadbeef too if your library is organized and you add the filebrowser plugin. I use strawberry over those two because it's the only one I can get from the main arch repositories and I try to minimize AUR usage.
Pragha actually fits this style too and is still in the arch repos, but I don't understand why because it stopped getting upstream updates years ago and is a buggy mess compared to strawberry with no advantages.
I definitely miss the clementine remote though, being able to control the player from an android phone was so convenient and I don't know any other player that has similar.
Still is. I use it everyday.
I love rhythym box, but had an issue getting it to show grillo dlna media shares, had to add dleyna packages and dleyna-grillo then everything was discoverable