Using Electron for something that should be lightweight like a music player should be an automatic disqualification.
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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What no cmus does to a MFer
No mention of VLC?
For music library management and playback? Why would they mention it? Just because it can play audio formats doesn’t mean it’s suitable for every use case or they’d have to mention every FFmpeg frontend too.
No disrespect. VLC was my go to on windows (Microsoft free these days). But with so many better options on Linux, I find it to be kinda mid compared to say:
But to each their own! 🫡
Ive been using vlc so long I forgot there was anything else..
I use Audacious.
It can use Winamp skins which is great, though lately I've been using its default UI.
I use Mopidy and NCMPCPP for mine
I have flailed around forever trying to find something that suits on Linux, mostly I use Internet Radio these days, (have a small Yamaha Amp and decent bookshelf soeakers and sub) and just use ther app seems to be 10000 specific channels, like best songs of 1973, or best of AC/DC or whatever. I use Radiodroid on Android as well
I used to just stuff a 1TB SD card full of MP3s and use that on my Android phone but alas those days have mostly past.
My janky 20 year old Foobar2k setup and plugin workflow is easily the thing I miss most when using Linux.
Thanks for posting!
Just this past weekend, I set up Navidrome on my refurbished Windows10-to-Linux media server machine. I'm using Symfonium on my phone, but I hadn't figured out how to play my collection in Linux.
I guess the answer is Feishin.
"The state of Linux music players" but no mention of Audacious or Deadbeef? For shame.
I had to dig to find Deadbeef, it is not mentioned in a lot of articles or music player round ups, I'm quite happy with it personally, although my needs are small, I have a big local library but it's already mostly organized and tagged, so I just needed something to play from directories which was quite hard to find actually, everything uses playlists which I don't want.
I don't see anyone mentioning Fooyin, which seems to be an attempt at being an open source clone of Foobar2000, right down to its plug in system.
Its making me feel concerned. Is there a reason foobar fans aren't using it? Do they just not know about it? Its missing a few features here and there, but the UI is so 1 to 1 that I can't imagine trying to use anything else as a replacement.
Its making me feel concerned. Is there a reason foobar fans aren’t using it? Do they just not know about it?
The latter, I assume, as I confess I had never heard of it before you mentioned it. Now that I've checked it out, it looks very promising! Thanks for the heads-up.
It does remind me a lot of foobar, the interface builder could use a little work certainly it's a little tricky, but it works! I accidentally deleted the whole layout at first and had to rebuild it because I deleted the master container haha. It was a learning experience anyways, and now it's working great and looking how I want :)
Yeah, I did not expect them to do that title justice, because how in the hell could anyone try 200 music players, but how did they get down to 7 and somehow skip some of the most popular players...? Did all of those somehow look broken on their setup? 🫠
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This is weirdly timely, considering I installed Feishin last week in my never-ending quest to find a music player that's as familiar and useful to me as iTunes.
Initially I was put off at having to also install Navidrome just to be able to listen to the music I alredy have available to me, but ultimately it's ok. And yeah, Feishin is nice. Perhaps a little 'busy', but compared to Strawberry it's minimal, stripped down application. I know everyone seems to love Strawberry, but I hate it. I shouldn't have to make a playlist in order to be able to listen to an album. Just let me press play on the sodding album!
Anyway, yeah +1 for Feishin here.
I stopped using iTunes around 2012 and I expect its design has changed quite a bit, since then; Banshee was a perfect capture of it, then, and I haven't been able to find a suitable replacement for Banshee since development halted on it.
Granted, the most important qualities, for me, is for the player to allow tagging within the app. and to rename and organize the files by their tags automatically once those tags have been modified and every Linux developer seems to hate that so my unique requirements seem to largely drive my impediment.
For iTunes based music player there is also rhythmbox which is standalone (no subsonic server needed). It's what i used until i ultimately switched to navidrome + supersonic. I'll check out feishin since that didn't come up in my initial search last year. Ive liked supersonic though. It has a decent, simple UI and you can play albums by clicking on them
Edit: ok feishin seems pretty cool. I might stick with this
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Really missing smth like musicbee :(
wait spin a docker container with navidrome and another docker with aonsoku web player and call it done or use any subsonic compatible clients. And this work anywhere!
I have a giant FLAC collection and I sometimes wish I could use these local players because I used Winamp/XMMS/quod libet back in the day, but I feel like I just can't give up consistent access from outside the house.
I ran Tauon for a while (and have run a few of the others over the years) but I always end up back at my Airsonic setup. Works in any browser, works in a few different Android apps (Subsonic compatible), less of a pain than mpd.
Maybe it'd be different if I was still sitting in front of my computer virtually all the time, but nowadays phone to Bluetooth speaker/car/Chromecast is like 90% of my listening.
No mention of Cantata, nor acknowledgement of Amarok's recent revival. Whatever the reason might be for those omissions, this article doesn't do a very good job of representing the state of linux music players.
Feishin, SuperSonic, cmus, and kew are the only ones I really like with kew being my personal favourite.
I don't need much from my music player as I just like to hit shuffle on all my songs (6000+) and kew just does that.
I've also started thinking about doing streaming music again as I currently have a month trial with Qobuz and I really like it. Thankfully lastnight I was FINALLY able to find a linux Qobuz player, QBZ, that works very well as I'm not a fan of the Qobuz webplayer.
I love cmus, I occasionally try other stuff for fun but always come back to it. Simple and low resource usage
For my mpd + ncmpcpp folks I would highly recommend RMPC. It's more of a modern take on TUI players (and actually supports displaying album covers!)
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is this your article? It's a really nice summary and helped me narrow down some choices as I prep a box.
Lollypop is actually a GTK3 app (it looks pretty dated on my mostly GKT4 GNOME setup) and it's imo still the best GNOME music app. I'm honestly suprised they say Lollypop's UX sucks but then praise RecordBox's because I can't stand RecordBox (why make me double click to play a song* and don't get me started on the Artist+Album view). Also surprised Gapless didn't get mentioned here, I think this is actually pretty decent though its queue system could use work.
*The dev says this choice is so you can select songs and instead you should use the little play button next on the right side of all playable entries.
Quod Libet's my player of choice
Cue sheets are important.
What are cue sheets?
.cue files are there to inform your player about where songs/chapters start in a record. It's mostly for situation where you have ripped CDs as singular files and not tracks. It's a frequent occurence in lossless torrents (.flac, .alac, .wav, audiocd territory) and the reasoning behind that may be that it keeps the most exact copy of a CD without any user-side interference, and .cue files are text files laying alongside your cd rip (and probably a log of ripping). Such interference may also be seen as unwanted in some cases, e.g. when the record is mastered that way one track seemlessly flows into another, so any way to cut between them is arguable.
I always used CUE splitting software to separate tracks.
I've done that for export to portable devices and for use in video editing, but other than that I keep them intact to keep seeding the original file without producing duplicates.
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Very nice article. Very useful.
I feel stuck between players that feel old and aged like Strawberry, and yet more electron apps like feishin. I've been using Supersonic, but I'd like to see more variety
Doesn't even mention deadbeef lmao
I'll have to try some of these later. I'm just manually opening folders in MPV as that's what I did with VLC on Windows lol
What a nice article. I use Kodi as my music player, or rather my multimedia center. My PC is hooked up to a 7.1 surround amplifier and my TV and I basically run Kodi all day.
Perhaps it would be more power efficient to use something else if I'm only playing music, though. I used to use MPD.
I need something similar to gmpc, that's actually being developed
I use Lollypop and I love it. I would like it to have more information about the track being played. Which audio player do you recommend for Gnome that is in GTK4? Thanks
I miss Banshee Media Player. We need a fork.
This was my music player for so long.
Built upon Mono and Gtk#
Oof, I tell you. Oof.
I doubt many devs will want to subject themselves to a Microsoft stack, so I wouldn't put too much hope into a fork. Probably rather worth seeing if any of the current music players have a similar UX...
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