First it was Amarok, then Clementine, and now it's Strawberry.

VLC

mpd + ncmpc

I am but a simple man. All my music is FLAC. It is arranged neatly in folders. I just want to select an album to play. I do not need album covers, playlists, search, streaming, tags, lyrics, analyzers, or scrobbling.

dd if=/dev/urandom | aplay

CMUS! I'm surprised more people aren't using this. It's very cool, ultra lightweight, and easy to use. Maybe I just like stuff that runs in the console.

MPD + ncmpcpp, I hate both and I'm yet to find anything better.

vim

I tried several and I very much appreciate Quod Libet

That said I'm interested in trying others' suggestions 👌

DeaDBeeF Player, I like lightweight and simple music players.

VLC

Tauon Music Box. I just point it at my Navidrome instance and hit shuffle usually.

Rhythmbox. It was pre-installed on Ubuntu back when I was on Ubuntu, and I kinda just got used to it. Strawberry looks really cool though, I may have to give it a try

Spotify 🫥

Clementine

I don't really love any that I've tried so far, but I dislike Audacious the least. FLAC, Musepack, and ReplayGain support are requirements for my library.

The last one I loved was foobar2000 on Windows, which supplanted Winamp. Linux UIs mostly feel a bit clunky by comparison. When the window has focus I like to have spacebar for pause/play, arrows up/down for primary gain, and arrows left/right for seek.

Quod Libet

Audacious

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).

mpv --no-video --shuffle

I use CMUS because I mainly work within terminal, without a mouse, and the controls feel like Vim

Audacious with a winamp skin. Nostalgic.

mpd

Audacious with winamp skins, weening off windows' foobar2000 as an old favorite, jellyamp, amberol occasionally

Feishin, Audacious and Strawberry

I love Strawberry!

amberol

Since I‘m only listen to music on Apple Music, I use Cider.

Yeah, put me down for Strawberry too. I used to use Rhythmbox up until mid 2023, I started to get into high res music and I got a tidal subscription, so switched to Strawberry.

When I used Ubuntu, I liked Rhythmbox. I tried Clementine and I also liked it. Nowadays, I use Strawberry on MX Linux. It is similar to Clementine.

About 2 years ago, I moved my music to Jellyfin and have been using their media players on every platform I use (iOS, FireTV, Ubuntu, and Windows). At this point my music library is close to 200 GB, kinda hard to store that much on every device I own.

Strawberry is also great if you are on windows as well. I support it in general, whether you use it on Windows or Linux. I've been using it whenever I want to listen to my music on my windows machine. Definitely gonna be using it with my next Linux machine (that isn't my absolute dogshit laptop). Before learning about Strawberry, I was just using Foobar2000 or VLC, which both just don't feel anywhere near as good to me than Strawberry.

Elisa for when i want my whole music library (it is a bit lacking in features tho), audacious w/ winamp classic skin (vibes) when im just playing files on my kde plasma box, and cmus on my qtile setup :3 also sicmuplayer on android cuz its the best

Lollypop. Simple interface that shows me album art. I can't always remember band names or artist names but I know what the damn album cover looks like 👍

Clementine. I sometimes use the Navidrome web UI too.

I just use mpv

For the most part I use ncmpcpp with mpd, but sometimes whenever I just want to listen to a single file I use mpv --no-video instead....

Nothing honestly. Couldn't find a music player that doesn't look like a file manager, has good search and queue features and doesn't make strong assumptions about how music is organized. Tried to run Musicolet through waydroid but it doesn't support Nvidia gpus

mpd + ncmpcpp

Probably a tie between audacious, strawberry, and qmmp

VLC when I'm listening to local files, ncspot for Spotify.

How do you get dark mode in Strawberry under KDE? I remember trying to follow some guides and not having much luck. But that was a long time ago at this point. Does this "just work" now?

Strawberry [clementine fork]

I stream from my Navidrome server, Supersonic is great.

Strawberry.

Our desktops are almost identical, lol.

Clementine

My distro came with Rhythmbox and I've pretty much just stuck with it. It does podcasts and radio which I appreciate and I can also edit track metadata in it. For playing music from my file browser I use MPV because it's fast.

I simply play music using mpv.

Rythmbox. Syncs to my iPod Classic.

lightweight media server Super fast indexing. Smooth web client. Also supports the subsonic api. I've been using the web client locally for some years now. I can also access my library on the go with substreamer on Android which is great. https://github.com/epoupon/lms

No one really. I've tried a bunch but never found one that felt just right. Clementine is the one that gets the closest.

I really wish MusicBee had a Linux port, it's the only thing I miss from Windows.

Sayonara

Rhythmbox

Going to ask here, anyone know a music player that is similar to AIMP? It has no native support, unfortunately.

https://www.aimp.ru/?do=download&os=linux

if I'm using gui on my laptop, then amberol

if I'm using my headless server, then you can't get anything better than mpd

Just mpv for me. Simplest and most versatile option

I agree with Strawberry. I'd love if Music Bee ever got a linux port or equivalent though

Amarok 1.4 from TDE

Strawberry+1

Clementine

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.

Tori. Play music in your terminal. Built in rust and has great performance, and low trace on memory impact.

used to be a rhythmbox guy but I've been using audacious for a few years now

mpd + Emacs frontend. There are dozens of us

Qmmp

I use Lollypop, I think it is pretty neat and pretty, it also recommends me an album of the day

Rhythmbox and Strawberry are the best, IMO. Rhythmbox has a lower impact on system resources but Strawberry is ideal for people with extensive music collections that you store offline like I do.

I've always just used audacious. It's been good. That said, I recently installed plex amp and the more I used it, the more I like it!

mpdevil! It's got a nice GTK4/Adwaita UI, integrates with mpd, and gets out of your way.

https://github.com/SoongNoonien/mpdevil

strawberry-qt5 from AUR

Elisa, better thank strawberry imo

Lollypop and Deadbeef

Quod Libet is my current favorite. It gives me a lot of the features and layout I used in Foobar2000 in Windows and isn't gigantic.

Mpd and Cantata. Deadbeef for playing from a directory or for conversation. I haven't found anything as good as cantata but I have to admit that I miss the monolithic and do everything of musicbee.

I like G4Music, beautiful and straightforward

Tauon Music Box is minimalist and is also probably the best open source Spotify player.

Sometimes I'll just run Spotifyd and control it with my phone.

I settled with Navidrome. It solves 2 use cases for me. Due to being web based it can be used by any PC or mobile device with access to my server. Additionally it supports subsonic which allows me to use a native android app (ultrasonic) and have music on the go. I don't use services like Spotify.

I wish MediMonkey was on Linux...

Sayonara.

Ncmcpp, MPV with scripts

Mpd has always served me well. I use ncccmmmmppp (however its spelled) to manage playlists and such. For album artwork I run sxiv pointed at file in /tmp/. I forget how that part works, actually. I have a grid layout on a second monitor, so I just square up the mpd client and sxiv. Doesn't look too bad.

Semi-related, but as a project I ripped out the pressure/impact pads of an old midi keyboard for use as prev/(pause/unpause)/next buttons, so if the song sucks I can literally punch my desk to skip it.

I used to use Strawberry, but my collection has grown enough that I can't just sync it everywhere, so I use Jellyfin now. I still use Strawberry's library management to move files into album artist/album/00 - track.ext though. Someday I'll dig into id3v2 to just write a script instead.

I use Sonixd as the frontend to my Navidrome server, and it's the bees knees.

Tidal app from AUR and MPD.

Amberol for its simplicity and esthetics

Mostly CMUS. Clementine on rare occasions.

Considering that I'm using Emby (selfhost), it's able to manage my music collection too and I can play the music from the web player exposed by it.

Plexamp all the way, easily the sexiest music player I've found so far. All my music is FLAC pulled from Deezer, and since I've got a very large list of artists tracked, it's super easy to discover new music with the radio and sonic analysis features. It's also got a last.fm integration, which gives me more data than Spotify would about my listening habits.

The only feature I'm really missing in it is collaborative playlists. I can share playlists out to anyone on my Plex server, but they can't add or remove songs.

Couldn't find any that works for me. At the moment I just play my music in mpv from terminal.

I just really love mplayer

Feishin for me and occasionally strawberry

I use apple music. On linux I use Ciderwhich is amazing. Super clean interface and lots of nobs to turn in order to make everything sound and behave the way I like. If you like apple music or are looking for a streaming solution cider is awesome.

navidrome + ultrasonic

Schism Tracker

Spotifyd

Is there a winamp clone?

Quodlibet

Foobar2000 has been here for YEAAAARS, and I don't think there is a good enough equivalent for linux, and by that I mean playlist tabs, global shortcuts, etc

I have to say Supersonic.

It's a Subsonic player that integrate with my Airsonic instance in Docker.

It requires a backend like Airsonic, Navidrome etc. It's not a stand alone player.

cmus is my favorite, elisa is my second favorite.

On Windows, I like Plexamp since I can keep all my music on a Plex server and access it whereever. There's a Linux version but I haven't tried it on Linux yet.

I usually listen to music on YouTube when I'm using a computer. When I play my own music, it's from my Plex server with plexamp with a phone. I rarely use the plexamp desktop app.

Dolphin + mpv for me so I can see the album covers and metadata and see whats available, if I have a specific song in mind, then ill just use the terminal and mpv.

Spotify-wayland on hyprland. And I also definetly dont have SpotX-bash, a great spotify adblocker installed!

mocp

i use foobar because i can't live without dolby headphone

Plex or Plexamp with Tidal integration.

Aqualung—does the small set of things I need it to, and is content to operate on files and directories rather than force the creation of a "music library" that doesn't in any way match how I categorize my music (although if you actually want a music library, it can do that). Only issue is that it's still GTK2, which may become a problem within the next few years.

I have been bouncing between CLI/GUI and several there of. On the CLI side I'm flipping back and forth between cmus and musikcube. I prefer cmus as it seems faster and has vim key motions an commands, but I like the TUI of musikcube better, its just got soo much extra stuff I don't use. I'd love to find a rust rewrite of it that trimmed out the web-server and most of the plugins as I never use them (and yes all you suckless heads I know, I could edit source and rebuild it but... Ain't nobody got time for that).

Another point for these is being able to detach them, both work fine in detached sessions so I can start an album or playlist and just say that's it, back to work. I use Zellij but I imagine using tmux or whatever would work just as well.

Now as for graphical apps I tend to use Amberol or Rhythmbox depending on what I'm doing, honestly both go fairly unused most the time. But I like having options, Amberol is more geared towards playlist style music so mixtapes or albums not shuffle all. Whereas Rhythmbox will let me just click my library and go ... both have good integrations to the widget stack in gnome and cinnamon as well as bars like nwg panel and Waybar.

Ooh had a fun though and tested. Musikcube works better in tty mode. So I will sometimes open second users in tty mode with ctrl+alt+f(1-5) or even clone a session into tty mode. and i just checked and cmus doesn't draw the whole screen only whats highlighted. so if you have to drop back to shell or something musikcube is the better option... although i imagine if you're in that situation music players and such are not high on the priority list :/ .

I really like Elisa.

I mostly use it to listen to music that's not in my Jellyfin library yet but it does that beautifully.

I just use Navidrome's web client. It does everything I need. DSub on Android.

Fooyin's great so far as a Foobar2k alternative.

MOC

Firefox (invidious). Its free, no ads, and I dont have to store files locally.

I used to use Amarok, but now I have a subscription to Youtube Music. It gives me a lot of flexibility on running it in a browser or on Android without worrying about syncing.

Haven't used it in a while but Amberol is simple (all I need) and gorgeous (which I care about).

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.

On Android its NewPipe. No ads, free, I can create playlists, and I dont have to store anything local.