this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024

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Searching for the best Music Player (slrpnk.net)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

WAIT!

before you start commenting that TUI musicplayer xy is the best, my priorities:

must have:

support for m3u playlists (synced to Android with Syncthingy) should autodetect them in a single folder I use also for the music files, and read/write them
support for viewing all files
support for custom music directories
support for deleting music files
Flatpak OR clutterfree on KDE

would like:

Pipewire output
nice simple GUI
modern, clutterfree design OR customizability
subtitles, cover images, etc.

I used G4Music which looks awesome and has minimal playlist support. It works really well but it cant write to the playlist. It is blazingly fast, and I made an issue, offering a bounty for write-to-playlist support.

I found Lollypop, the old GTK UI is way better than the Qt alternatives, while still kinda ugly. But it seems to tick all boxes, apart from Pipewire support.

What I tried:

G4Music

UI perfect
no file deletion
no playlist addition
no playlist creation

Lollypop

UI is bareable
pulseaudio, no setting at all
playlist support including writing to! You need to enable it
lots of internet stuff for artwork and subtitles
sane defaults

GNOME music

does not detect my .m3u playlists
slow
needs pulseaudio
settings are a joke
no folder view

Strawberry

UI is horrible and not customizable enough
no Pipewire support
no .m3u detection
cluttered, no UI zoom possible
system icon theme is not applied

Clementine

like strawberry but different?
more online stuff
interface less customizable
cursor broken on the Flatpak

Amarok

Strawberry in even older?
bloat?
retro-development status

MusicPod

UI hides too much stuff
no playlist support
no filesystem hierarchy support
strange Ubuntu look, but good UI, fancy background
no podcast backup file support (so Kasts is better for that)
but pipewire support!

Plattenalbum

no playlist support
otherwise looks great

Resonance

modern, GTK4 Libadwaita, UI is damn lit
freezes, fills up the entire RAM (scans every title at once!) -> not optimized at all, made system freeze and needed to hard shutdown.
no playlist support?
no pipewire support?

Melody

uses soon EOL GNOME 42 runtime

Amberol

beautiful but too minimalist
why are there soo many GNOME music players??

moosync

very nice UI
electron: tiny cursor on Wayland, no Pipewire support
plugin support for Youtube, Spotify (using librespot) and LastFM
local playlists seem broken

top 19 comments

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[–] paskalivichi 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If your system is using pipewire, any audio player will also use it.

Strawberry is the best youre gonna get. For KDE, Elisa is also an option ive used in the past. Prettier but simpler.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

No it will use ALSA, Jack or often Pulseaudio. Pipewire can plug into these, but this causes overhead and to my knowledge doesnt allow things like external Equalization.

I may have to give Elisa another try. I think Strawberry (and Clementine) and Elisa suck. They are completely unintuitive, the UI has too many buttons and options for random stuff, and basic things you expect dont work.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Source? PipeWire was designed to use those APIs. This is the first time I hear about it causing any particular issues or overhead.

[–] Klaymore 2 points 4 months ago

I use Strawberry with JamesDSP for Linux (on Pipewire) and the equalizer works, not sure how other equalizer software does it though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure Fooyin meets all these. It's still very early in development but I like it more than any of the other native Linux music players I've tried.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Yes I tried it and really like a lot of it, but some thing didnt suit my needs.

Maybe it was the lack of setting a custom directory, or not read/writing the .m3u playlist files correctly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Deadbeef might be worth a look, though you might need a plugin for folder view

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I've been down this rabbit hole as well. They all have problems but I'm most happy with Cantata for library playing (beets for file/tag management) and deadbeef for odd local files and file conversation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

The lack of a really good, customizable player on Linux has been probably my least favorite part of the whole experience. Deadbeef is close, but it seriously needs a good media library plugin.

For that reason, I'm still using foobar2000, which is Windows-only but available as a Snap using wine (and yes, I hate Snap). I check regularly to see if there are better native options, but even with the clunk from Snap and the relatively ugly UI due to wine, foobar remains superior IMHO. I think it checks all your boxes, except it's a Snap.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I dunno if VLC can do "Pipewire output", but I think it does a lot of the other stuff you mentioned. I use it on my desktop (Mint) and my phone (Android) and it suits my needs at least.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Hm, VLC is an unofficial (but very well done) Flatpak, no Wayland support and a bit bloated and not well suited for playing music afaik. But I may have to give it another try.

The new 4.0 version of VLC looks very cool, but it is only available from an Ubuntu PPA which I used with a Ubuntu Distrobox, but no way that sucks too.

Should do some Github action to extract the binary from that PPA and pack it into a Flatpak.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

MPD + some GUI client. Plattenalbum is one such client but it's an outlier because its album based when MPD is playlist based.

directories for music or playlists are configurable
supports alsa, jack, pulseaudio, and pipewire
album art is up to the client
deleting music is up to the client.

Cantata is another GUI mpd client that I've used and enjoyed. It's unmaintained but would other fit your needs. I also recommend installing mpDris for mpris support.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Maybe JuK: https://juk.kde.org/

It is for the most part as minimal as it looks, except that it's actually quite good for playlists and managing one's music collection.

It doesn't have a ton of devs behind it, so I would be surprised, if they had native Pipewire support already. Otherwise, I think, it covers what you've listed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Juk was the main music player in LXQt and I cant find it anywhere.

It will likely be on Qt5 or even older, and not get updates any time soon.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Dunno what you mean. JuK was ported to Qt6 last February alongside the rest of KDE. It's on Flathub and most distro repositories.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Interesting maybe that was a bit later, when I looked I could not find it.

Thanks for pointing that out!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Interesting? I didnt know that. Will have another look at it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Try Sayonara. I think it checks most if not all your boxes. I love it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Very interesting app!