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.

"The state of Linux music players" but no mention of Audacious or Deadbeef? For shame.

There is too much focus on GTK4 libadwaita apps in this article. Libadwaita apps already dominate the front pages of Flathub everyday because of obvious bias.

On the Qt/KDE side, Elisa, Fooyin and Cantata are good recommendations.

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!)

No mention of VLC?

Using Electron for something that should be lightweight like a music player should be an automatic disqualification.

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.

Deadbeef

Cue sheets are important.

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

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

Doesn't even mention deadbeef lmao

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!

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 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.

Funkwhale: you can share your music library but you need a server.

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.

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'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

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.

is this your article? It's a really nice summary and helped me narrow down some choices as I prep a box.

Really missing smth like musicbee :(

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.