Recently switched to Linux and have been looking for alternatives for Musicbee, which I used for ages in Windows. I guess I could make it work with Wine but thought I’d ask here for suggestions first. Features I’m looking for are not a lot to ask IMO:
- Music folder can be anywhere, not only ~/Music
- In the list of songs by a given artist, I can sort by album year, but the tracks within each album stay in the correct order
- The player remembers where I left off the next time I open it
I’m using Rhythmbox and it’s great but unfortunately it doesn’t do #3 (if I missed some setting let me know please).
Thanks in advance!
Edit: Best options from the comments were Strawberry and Quod Libet. I think I’ll go with Quod Libet. Thanks all for the suggestions.
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Quod Libet can do 1 and 3 for sure, I think it can do #2 but I’m not positive. I don’t have a music collection with very many albums that have multiple tracks. You can pick and choose which metadata columns show up for your library and sort by whatever you want, including creating your own but that’s outside my expertise. It can do bulk renaming too.
I was using Clementine for awhile, then because of a lack of updates and some other minor issues, I switched to Strawberry which is a fork of Clementine. It added some neat features but lost a few too. After using a dozen or so different players, I found Quod Libet just works like I want it to.
The way I listen to music is to dump all my files into a single folder called “music”, then do shuffle, repeat all. I was in the process of moving my files to a new storage and moved the folder around a few times. Just had to update the library with a scan, took like 10 seconds.
I also have it set up to automatically resume playing from where it left off. One of the options is then queue autosave interval, which does the resume from where you left off. It’s enabled by default I believe. You can set it to autosave every second if you want but to use less system resources, I stick with the default of 60 and I think it saves on shutdown/restart too. I’ve never noticed it NOT resume from where I left off.
It has a plugin system to add features but otherwise it starts off very bare bones. You add plugins to basically build your own player the way you want it. That means it can be a bit of work to initially setup. While that sounds like a pain, the amount of time I’ve spent in Quod Libet’s settings is a tiny fraction of the amount of time I spent messing with Clementine and Strawberry’s options, as well as other players. It’s probably the music player I’ve seen the GUI for the least in my entire life, as a ratio to how much music I’ve listened to with it.
Speaking of Quod Libet, Ex Falso from them is still the best way to fix meta data on music that I have found - so very very handy.
Thanks for this tip also, will check it out
Quod Libet looks great, thanks! Probably going to go with this one. Looks pretty similar to Rhythmbox and also does #3 from my list
cmus.
I know it satisfies 1, mostly sure it satisfies 2, and looks like 3 was implemented somewhat recently
https://github.com/cmus/cmus/pull/1325
yep, just tested and resume works.
I use the SMplayer, it’s IMHO the best Media Player. Capable of streaming, even YouTube, all needed Codecs for practically any mediaformats, portable version.
https://github.com/smplayer-dev/smplayer
I’ve been using Strawberry for my local music for a bit, might not be the most modern looking, but I’d say it’s decent. You can set folders to be scanned, and if you double click an artist’s folder in the “collection” menu it’ll add all their songs to the queue in whatever order you’re sorting by. It’ll at least remember the last played song, so just pressing play should start that song assuming you didn’t clear the queue. Doesn’t seem to remember how far into the song you were before closing it if that’s what you’re after though.
Seconding strawberry 🍓
Seems promising, thanks! I don’t care about song position, just that it remembers which song.
strawberry can do all iirc
Out of all the music players I’ve tried on Linux, Clementine variants like Strawberry are the best ones for my needs. I’m not entirely sure of #2, but otherwise yeah, it does all that and more.
Audacious is also a decent low resource player.
I’m pretty sure if your metadata is correct you can enable the album year collumn and when applying a new sorting, it doesn’t touch the previous one.
So for example if you sort alphabetically first, then album year, it would be “grouped” by album year and inside each group it would be alphabetical. I say group because it could be that two albums released in the same year.
Audacious is also cool if you want to go “retro” and use old winamp skins.
Definitely agree - I usually use cmus because it follows my system theme as part of the terminal and kind of fits in anywhere, but for graphical players having options for skins is a must for me. Used to like all the options for this on AIMP when I used to use Windows.
music player demon runs in the background and plays music (always remembers its position, and if you reboot while playing music it’ll continue playing automatically when the system is up again), and can be controlled by various clients like Cantata, Euphonica or Plattenalbum (they should all do 2.) and many others. It can output network streams, clients can connect over the network (control the music on your PC from your phone), utility demons to feed your play queue with similar or random songs…
Very versatile, though setup is a bit more complicated than with one simple program.
Pretty sure Strawberry does everything you are looking for.
re: #1 I kind of had the same issue but with multiple music folders, most of the default music apps only let you use one folder. Strawberry lets you add as many music folders as you like, I’ve been happy with it.
On Windows I used to use foobar2000 which was great, and in theory I could get it running under Linux, but I’d rather just use something coded for Linux compatibility from the start.
Man I do miss foobar2000, it was a perfect all-in-one package that did things I need multiple Linux programs for. Great piece of software. However, in the spirit of this community, it’s not Open Source.
Last I tried, foobar worked well under Wine
There is an Linux compatible open source player being developed called fooyin (https://fooyin.org/) heavily inspired by foobar2000. When I tried it out a few months back it was still a bit rough for day-to-day use but it could eventually become a good alternative for people that miss the foobar2000 style player.
I’ve been happy with Sayonara but don’t know if it can do #2
You can have a look at this list : https://www.linuxlinks.com/best-free-open-source-music-players/
What about Navidrome as a server and Feishin as the client.
Or my second backup system mpd + rmpc (terminal music player with artwork support)
DeaDBeeF can probably do all three.
There are many music players, none of them is extremely good. I like Sayonara.
Elisa, from kde
I’m currently using Strawberry. Before that Deadbeef (was perfectly happy with Deadbeaf, just tried something different). MPD with Cantata was on the cards but not got to it yet.
If you like the command line aesthetic… Auditorium.
Or Kew
