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?
First it was Amarok, then Clementine, and now it’s Strawberry.
MPD + ncmpcpp, I hate both and I’m yet to find anything better.
I feel this. If you could right click to interact with the text objects, then this combo would basically feel like foobar2000 for linux. I’m old enough to have missed how great foobar2000 felt after WinAmp started to get bloated (back before I got my hands on some Linux ISOs), so MPD + ncmpcpp just felt so refreshingly stripped down and a little nostalgic. I just fucking hate having to memorize a bunch of non-intuitive hotkey combos to do anything. Probably the same reason I’ve never bothered to properly learn Vim.
I’m an Emacs graybeard, so complex keybindings don’t scare me. My problem with ncmpcpp is twofold:
- It relies on MPD which is always a PITA to properly configure. Pulseaudio always managed to make it not work on a fresh system. Hopefully with Pipewire it’ll be better.
- The config format make no sense whatsoever. Especially the one with keybindings. It’s so cryptic I just stopped trying to understand it. Again, I’m an Emacs graybeard, to stress it as a point of reference.
dd if=/dev/urandom | aplay
vim
Mom: switch that off!
Kid: I can’t!
DeaDBeeF Player, I like lightweight and simple music players.
I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you that spotify sucks, they hate artists but love Joe Rogan. If you can’t buy albums via bandcamp, Tidal offers quality and royalties far superior to Spottily. You can transfer your playlist in a few clicks and the price is almost identical (6 accounts for like $15/m).
Spotify-wayland on hyprland. And I also definetly dont have SpotX-bash, a great spotify adblocker installed!
mpd + ncmpcpp
Quod Libet
Still awesome!
I tried several and I very much appreciate Quod Libet
That said I’m interested in trying others’ suggestions 👌
VLC because it works with everything and it doesn’t try to organise my music collection for me.
MPD + Cantata
For the most part I just lump all my music into one playlist regardless of album or genre, but day to day I also use several different computers, and I find MPD to be the best for syncing configurations across all of them. Cantata also allows me to see album artwork and track information really easily and has good touchscreen support compared to terminal-based MPD clients.Spotify 🫥
Dies by open-source crowd linching
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.
How do you discover new music? I’m the type that listen to the same thing over and over again but I realized even I rely entirely on autogenerated playlists of Spotify.
Sometimes I poke around Wikipedia and see what other artists collaborated with, influenced, or were influenced by artists I like, and buy their albums.
Sometimes I download highly-rated shows from random artists on Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive
Sometimes friends recommend stuff.
How do you download your music?
My client doesn’t have to answer that.