The state of Linux music players in 2026
https://crescentro.se/posts/linux-music-players-2026/Open linkView original on programming.dev227
Comments56https://crescentro.se/posts/linux-music-players-2026/Open linkView original on programming.devhttps://crescentro.se/posts/linux-music-players-2026/Open linkView original on programming.dev
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.
For iTunes based music player there is also rhythmbox which is standalone (no subsonic server needed). It's what i used until i ultimately switched to navidrome + supersonic. I'll check out feishin since that didn't come up in my initial search last year. Ive liked supersonic though. It has a decent, simple UI and you can play albums by clicking on them
Edit: ok feishin seems pretty cool. I might stick with this
I only listen to albums (I have zero playlists) and I just double click on an album in Strawberry to listen to it.
I stopped using iTunes around 2012 and I expect its design has changed quite a bit, since then; Banshee was a perfect capture of it, then, and I haven't been able to find a suitable replacement for Banshee since development halted on it.
Granted, the most important qualities, for me, is for the player to allow tagging within the app. and to rename and organize the files by their tags automatically once those tags have been modified and every Linux developer seems to hate that so my unique requirements seem to largely drive my impediment.
"The state of Linux music players" but no mention of Audacious or Deadbeef? For shame.
Yeah, same. It's the closest thing I've found to foobar2000 on Linux, in many ways.
Edit: TIL Fooyin exists. -> Flathub
Thanks, @[email protected]
I don't see anyone mentioning Fooyin, which seems to be an attempt at being an open source clone of Foobar2000, right down to its plug in system.
Its making me feel concerned. Is there a reason foobar fans aren't using it? Do they just not know about it? Its missing a few features here and there, but the UI is so 1 to 1 that I can't imagine trying to use anything else as a replacement.
The latter, I assume, as I confess I had never heard of it before you mentioned it. Now that I've checked it out, it looks very promising! Thanks for the heads-up.
Yeah, I did not expect them to do that title justice, because how in the hell could anyone try 200 music players, but how did they get down to 7 and somehow skip some of the most popular players...? Did all of those somehow look broken on their setup? 🫠
I've used VLC in WIndows forever, but it started giving me glitchy behavior in Ubuntu. Tried to upgrade to see if it was an old version/Snap thing, got frustrated with it not working. So I went through all the lists of Linux players, tried most of them. I like Audacious. It's not perfect, but it works well, and I can deal with some of the minor things that are more preferences than problems. That's all I wanted.
Deadbeef comes the closest to what I want in a music player. If I could get rid of the playlist display at the bottom and edit tags, it would be perfect.
Well, that sucks :( i was going to try it but i seem to be forever fixing tags, ao that's a must have feature
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!)
That does look neat, album covers are definitely a feature that's sorely missing from ncmpcpp!
https://github.com/ravachol/kew
No mention of VLC?
Ive been using vlc so long I forgot there was anything else..
No disrespect. VLC was my go to on windows (Microsoft free these days). But with so many better options on Linux, I find it to be kinda mid compared to say:
MPV
But to each their own! 🫡
For music library management and playback? Why would they mention it? Just because it can play audio formats doesn’t mean it’s suitable for every use case or they’d have to mention every FFmpeg frontend too.
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.
I love cmus, I occasionally try other stuff for fun but always come back to it. Simple and low resource usage
Deadbeef
Cue sheets are important.
What are cue sheets?
.cue files are there to inform your player about where songs/chapters start in a record. It's mostly for situation where you have ripped CDs as singular files and not tracks. It's a frequent occurence in lossless torrents (.flac, .alac, .wav, audiocd territory) and the reasoning behind that may be that it keeps the most exact copy of a CD without any user-side interference, and .cue files are text files laying alongside your cd rip (and probably a log of ripping). Such interference may also be seen as unwanted in some cases, e.g. when the record is mastered that way one track seemlessly flows into another, so any way to cut between them is arguable.
I always used CUE splitting software to separate tracks.
I've done that for export to portable devices and for use in video editing, but other than that I keep them intact to keep seeding the original file without producing duplicates.
Ah, neat that makes sense, thanks for explaining!
I need lidarr to support them
Lidarr can’t even get a reliable metadata provider or allow people to define their own without forking the project. It’s pretty mismanaged.
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
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.
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!
Doesn't even mention deadbeef lmao
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'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
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 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.
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.
is this your article? It's a really nice summary and helped me narrow down some choices as I prep a box.
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.
Funkwhale: you can share your music library but you need a server.
I miss Banshee Media Player. We need a fork.
This was my music player for so long.
Oof, I tell you. Oof.
I doubt many devs will want to subject themselves to a Microsoft stack, so I wouldn't put too much hope into a fork. Probably rather worth seeing if any of the current music players have a similar UX...
I need something similar to gmpc, that's actually being developed
Very nice article. Very useful.
What no cmus does to a MFer
I use Audacious.
It can use Winamp skins which is great, though lately I've been using its default UI.
This is a terrible, ignorant, vibe-coded list. Arguably the fact that Spotify is your primary listening platform automatically invalidates any opinions on any linux media player you might stumble across.
No Spotify?
Spotify is trash