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this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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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.
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.
This doesn't seem exhaustive enough to be titled "the state of Linux music players."
I agree, it's missing so many.
That screenshot of Strawberry in the blog post really makes it look bad.
Here's a better one...
Quodlibet is the one with all the features.
I absolutely adore being able to click into and between genres and artists to get to albums and songs instantly. I want to ultimately move back to MPD, maybe Navidrome or Subsonic, but... I just love Quod Libet.
I love that it has proper search queries: https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/searching.html
Do other players have this as well?
And the queries work with custom tags, which can also be added to any element of the UI. It's so good if you're ADHD about organization.
I love how I can type things like #(added < 1 week) to search for albums I recently added to my library.
this looks like foobar2k, cool
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Audacious is the only one I've tried and works perfect for me. Load up my whole library and shuffle!
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.
Audacious has a Winamp skin, that's enough for me.
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.
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.
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I just use Subsonic and stream music from my server sitting literally a foot away
Mood. Love what subsonic has let me do with my music collection. Navidrome, Arpeggi, and music assistant.
As all my music is stored on my jellyfin, and since I like the GNOME-isms, I can't recommend Gelly enough.
Saving this thread for later. Hoping to find something with a wide variety of visualizers
I only need fooyin
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.
You can just use Syncthing for syncing.
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.
I'd recommend using something like Navidrome instead of manually syncing the files.
Interesting! Gapless is the only modern one and it is fine-ish
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
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.
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
VLC is where it’s at.
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.
I used Mopidy for NCMPCPP for Spotify for a few years, that was fun.
Where did xmms go, by the way?
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.
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Nobody is talking about muffon but I think it's very close to perfect.
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