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?
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.
Foobar2000, which is a Windows application but available as a snap using wine.
I really want to use DeaDBeeF because it is Linux native and has similar customization features (I like big album art, for example), but sadly its library management leaves a lot to be desired compared to Foobar’s. I don’t want to have to generate a playlist every time I want to listen to an album, nor do I want to have to clear that playlist when I’m done.
I haven’t found any other player with even remotely similar customization available.
Rhythmbox and Strawberry are the best, IMO. Rhythmbox has a lower impact on system resources but Strawberry is ideal for people with extensive music collections that you store offline like I do.
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
Musicbee with wine! I have never been able to find something that does it all as well as musicbee, and I’ve tried almost every single linux music player. I have a huge music library, I add a ton of music regularly. I need auto-tagging, i need to be able to sort, filter and search, a very customizable interface, all of the mp3 tags including obscure ones, gapless playback, configurable fade-in/fade-out, etc etc. With the exception of a few little nitpicks like not integrating well with the KDE media widget, and some occasional annoyances with pipewire, everything works great.
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