The Linux Music Player Battle Thread

[ward]

We got off-topic in the potable music player thread so I realized we needed a thread specifically for music players on Linux. I don't want to fight over which player is best. That's how I used to think... but the better question is: "which player is best for each person?" Each of us have different needs. Some can be fine with Strawberry or Deadbeaf... but others will need nerdier solutions.

Music is more important to me than any other form of media so I tend to have very specific needs. Let's talk about what we use and why. I'll admit that nothing on Linux has covered 100% of my needs and I reject the idea that I should adjust my needs to fit what can be done with Linux. When I started using Fooyin, it didn't have good support for video game music, but we screamed to the heavens and the legend, kode54, jumped in to help bring wide support for everything... it's now native. So, I think we should push for what we need and explore better ways to make that happen.

I'm really curious about MPD @chiefterror. There's a lot of cool front-ends as well. Maybe you will know if it works for me after I lay out what I need any why I use Foobar on windows and Fooyin on Linux.

Here's what I must have a player:

• The basics: auto playlists that can be organized by genre, artist, year, etc., album art, album art thumbnails
• Standard format support: opus (most important), aac, ogg, mp4, mp3, wav, FLAC, etc.
• Video game music formats: VGZ, VGM, SPC, MIDI, MOD, PSF, PSF2, MINI2SF, SSF
• Lyrics viewer
• Batch file conversion tools (convert FLAC to opus, etc.)
• Batch metadata & file rename tools (file operations in Foobar)
• External metadata tags (tags in a text file or something because many video game formats don't support saving metadata info to the file, which makes organization extremely messy... so external tags fix this)
• Support for custom playlists
• Ability to organize by date added or date last modified
• Ability to use a NAS for the library location

Nice to have:

• File server so I can access my music remotely
• Metadata browser
• Artist bios (pulled from last.fm or something)
• Album Art downloader
• Replay gain adjustments by album or song
• Visualizations (I use old winamp milkdrop, etc. in Foobar2000 with a plugin and it's epic)

Here is my vertical Foobar2000 setup:


Here if fooyin (it's horizontal because I don't have a vertical monitor hooked up to my laptop)


Foobar2000 does 100% of what I need thanks to all the plugins. Fooyin is about 70% there, but I think it will evolve into the best player. It's way ahead of about 20 other programs on Linux (I spent a ton of time testing players).

However, MPD looks interesting. I couldn't figure out how good the support was for several things on my "must-have," list... and it looks like fooyin has better support for the video game formats I need. So, it might be that my needs don't align with what can currently be done with MPD... but it also looks like MPD is better in regard to allowing me to stream music to other devices.

Anyway, I hope this thread becomes something to help everyone find the player that specifically covers their needs.

[mega]

As said on the other thread DeaDBeeF for me, does everything I need

Here's an old screenshot of my setup

[ward]

That's the thing... if it does what you need, then I'd never try to push you to use something else. I guess it's fun to find out what other programs can do, because sometimes you don't know you need a thing until you find out that it exists. Anyway, bottom line is that we are all different and you should use whatever suits you best.

That screenshot is clean and minimal it makes me nervous, lol.

[chiefterror]

I think the closest MPD client that matches your needs is this particular fork of Cantata: https://github.com/nullobsi/cantata



I personally have never used it, but I haven't ever seen a GUI-based MPD client with more from-the-get-go features as this, and one that's a lot easier to set up than just about any other. I can't exactly determine that it has every feature you require; I have no idea if there's any file operations in the GUI, for example.

CoverGrid also deserves a mention - https://www.suruatoel.xyz/codes/mcg - Essentially, its a client that emphasizes listening to whole albums rather than by tracks or playlists, beautiful frontend really. That said not everyone likes the "wall of covers" look and I think it's actually limited-in-scope on purpose. Again, haven't used it, but I love seeing this shit:



You'll still have to set up your MPD server, but once you got it ready and its linked with Cantata, should be smooth sailing. Here's a basic sample of the server config process, perfect excuse to start using the green text:

• sudo pacman -S mpd

• Copy /usr/share/doc/mpd/mpdconf.example to ~/.config/mpd/mpd.conf

• nvim ~/.config/mpd/mpd.conf (or just vim, plain ol' nano, or whatever other console text editor, or even VSCodium and the like, really)

• Uncomment the following, and change the directories as needed. This can be bound to either local folders or an IP address for a NAS (@ward the latter is most likely your use case). If you're using the bone-stock local music folder, it should look like this for example:
  • music_directory=/home/yourusername/Music or ~/Music (M must be capitalised)
    db_file - database file
    pid_file
    state_file - this will maintain playback status between machine boots or server startups; totally optional.
  Scroll to line ~78, uncomment "bind_to_address" and "port"
  • change bind_to_address value to "localhost"; you don't have to change the port number, but don't let me stop you
  Uncomment "restore_paused" around line ~97 and set value to "yes" - this prevents your music from just blaring every time you run the MPD service or boot your machine; leave unchanged if you prefer the opposite, for whatever reason (example: your MPD server is headless AND has audio output, a la Raspberry Pi).
  
  (Optional) Symlinks - line ~134:
  • uncomment "follow_outside_symlinks," set value to "yes"
    • Symlinks can be used to detect and utilize music sources other than the one listed in your config's default directory, thereby preventing the need to copy files from one location to the default. There's a lot more to it that goes a little outside the scope of this guide, though.
    ALSA output:
    • Line ~200: uncomment "(audio_output{ and })" as well as "type" and "name" inside the box; then uncomment "mixer_type" and set value to "software"
      • An option for Pipewire exists as well, which may be better on modern distros; mostly the same process as above, I think.
      Save the file, restart daemon:
      • mpd --kill
      • mpd
      • systemctl --user enable mpd.service (do not I mean DO NOT run this as root, for Christ's sake)
      From here on out you can determine what client to use and the setup process for this.

As usual, cross-reference the Arch Wiki page (literally the best Linux wiki out there next to the Gentoo docs), there's a lot I'm missing in that guide and some solutions might not work on all machines, and I might be wrong about a thing or two. I remain painfully human. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Music_Player_Daemon

EDIT: "mixer_type" entry in green box

[ward]

I really like the philosophy of cover grid. I could write a book on how/why it's best to listen to whole albums rather than playlists. Albums have a mood or a feel that only comes through when taken as a whole. It's a completely different experience and far better than just a random song.

Anyway, those themes are far too simple and modern for me. I need way too much info for my music. I'm also a control freak with my own stuff, which also worries me because this MPD rabbit hole could turn into a full time job, lol. I'd have to piece something together. I have to head back to Taiwan soon, so maybe I'll tinker with it on my laptop while I have downtime there.

[chiefterror]

I'm also a control freak with my own stuff, which also worries me because this MPD rabbit hole could turn into a full time job, lol.

You're not wrong, I was gonna say that for a beginner MPD is something you're gonna need to set aside time for that most do not have. I'm probably a little biased because I tend to adapt and learn new stuff in software all the time, maybe a faster rate than usual, and I often forget to take into account that not everyone works that way. I still keep Fooyin installed along with my daemon configs and RMPC just in case something goes haywire. The last thing I want to encourage is other people wasting their time figuring out something new that might be redundant in the first place; that's my job!

[mega]

That's the thing... if it does what you need, then I'd never try to push you to use something else. I guess it's fun to find out what other programs can do, because sometimes you don't know you need a thing until you find out that it exists. Anyway, bottom line is that we are all different and you should use whatever suits you best.

That screenshot is clean and minimal it makes me nervous, lol.

I guess I am a minimal ui guy but I do like powerful stuff behind the scenes, the beauty of deadbeef i think is you can do a lot with it, especially with the plugins it's a lot like foobar2000

I'm absolutely going to try fooyin though it looks great :cool:

[Casey]

I've hopped music players several times. I've used everything mentioned in this thread aside from fooyin...these days I just run everything through jellyfin, even from my main machine that hosts the server. It works on all of my devices and I like to use the same software across every device.

[acalora]

Hey y'all, just joined the forum! Figured I'd drop in to show my Fooyin setup.

I moved to Linux about a month ago, and finding a music player that could stand up to my foobar2000 setup on Windows was easily one of the biggest challenges. Like some of the others in this thread, I've tried nearly all the major ones that get recommended everywhere (strawberry, deadbeef, rhythmbox, even running foobar2000 in wine). I stumbled on Fooyin during my search after browsing some forums and seeing it mentioned here and there. So far, it's the closest in terms of UI and library management functionality.

Library management is, imo, a very underrated feature of foobar2000. Sure, the UI is super customizable, and that's terrific, but what I really liked about foobar2000 was the ability to easily display my library in different contexts. If I wanted to rip a bunch of new CDs and filter on only newly ripped albums, I could click a button to do that. If I wanted to filter by bitrate or find duplicate songs, I could click a button and do that. Fooyin really comes close, although it's not perfect, I'm still waiting for MusicBrainz and Discogs integration for automatic tagging, as well as one-click conversion to opus, just to name a couple things I'm still missing from foobar2000.

[skullmeat]

Im not a linux user "yet" and I have a question: my goto on windows is a player called AIMP, which I have been using for many years as an alternative to WinAMP. Its lightweight and compact, has tones of themes, even a quake style drop down mode. I want something like that, but for linux. Any suggestions would be great.