Live data from Hacker News

DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

deadbeef.sourceforge.io

11–20 of 155 posts

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#11
Tried a lot of music players so far. Currently Deadbeef is my default one, despite two things I don't like:

a) The search could be a bit more fuzzy (search "ade" and you won't find "adé")

b) importing a directory takes ages; what takes me 5-7 minutes is done by Quod Libet in Otherwise, love it!

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#12
It's funny how a UI can look old. This looks like what Python Tkinter would spit out. Anyway at least for me software like this is more tangible nowadays (I could make it) though I'm not much of a music person (programming related to audio).

I also used to have mp3s but not anymore, with Spotify, SoundCloud, BandCamp or YouTube with UBO.

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#13
Although I don't use DeaDBeeF as my primary music player anymore, back when I did, I wrote a plugin for using VgmStream with DeaDBeeF around 10 years ago, so I could more easily listen to video game soundtracks directly from the game files. For whatever reason, I have continued to maintain said plugin despite that I only use DeaDBeeF to test updates to it.

It's not on the plugins list because I haven't bothered trying to get it there. I don't think that list existed when I wrote this. I approached the author about upstreaming it instead, thinking it would be a good compliment to the builtin Game_Music_Emu plugin for emulating various old video game and computer audio chips. They seemed a bit upset that people didn't want to maintain external plugins, but actually I didn't really mind doing so. Maybe I should look into getting it on that list some day.

Either way, if streamed video game music formats are up your alley and you like DeaDBeeF, then shameless plug: https://github.com/jchv/deadbeef-vgmstream

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#14
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And the name is terrible. The name is just a piece of hacker lore from back in the day https://catb.org/jargon/html/D/DEADBEEF.html

I know what it is, that doesn't make it good.

It's amazing how bad software developers are at naming their projects. At least this one is unique enough to be searchable, and could probably be SEO'ed above the computer lore (indeed, at least for me it's already #1 for "deadbeef" on the Google SERP).

The worst are when they pick a generic English word for a project that has nothing to do with that word. I'm not going to name and shame, but there are so many examples of new project that get posted to HN monthly that have irrelevant and unsearchable names. We see things like "Show HN: Banana - A lightweight URL parsing library in Rust". WTF does URL parsing have to do with bananas? How do you expect that word to be uniquely searchable back to your project??

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#15
post #2

Some people I know love it but it just doesn't work for me in the way I use a music player. It's similar to foobar2000 in some ways which depending on your preferences can be good or bad. And the name is terrible. Strawberry is better for me but still kind of janky. Quod Libet and Rythmbox would seem closer to my ideal interface-wise, but scored massive own goals they seemingly will never recover from. How in 2025 mu…

Music players are a great example of a type of app that at first brush seems simple and difficult to do badly, but in reality is littered with subtleties and bits that hinge on the preferences of the user, all of which can make or break the app. Makes it easy to understand why there’s more players than can be counted but few worth using.

That's because they all try to be more than they should be. I don't need or want a visualization option. I don't need or want an equalizer. I don't need or want a library. Those functions properly belong in other places or in the waste bin. My music library is on my filesystem and is sorted and arranged as I prefer. When I want to play an album I drag it over to MPC-HC. When I want to create a custom playlist, I open the playlist and drag songs over in the order I want. I don't need a psychedelic visualization, my use case for playing music on my pc is as background audio. The function of an equalizer is to make up for shortcomings in my speakers and belongs there. The media player should convert an encoded file into PCM data to be shoved out the DAC. Leave the file managing to my file manager. The sound shaping to my speakers. And the crap frequency domain visualizations in the trash.

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#16
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what it is, that doesn't make it good.

It's amazing how bad software developers are at naming their projects. At least this one is unique enough to be searchable, and could probably be SEO'ed above the computer lore (indeed, at least for me it's already #1 for "deadbeef" on the Google SERP). The worst are when they pick a generic English word for a project that has nothing to do with that word. I'm not going to name and shame, but there are so many exampl…

Isn't it obvious ? Lightweight URL parsing library in Rust is just Bananas!

But i totally get your point.

I'm wondering that if some random gibberish might even be better to name a project nowadays. At least there would be less SEO collision.

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#17
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music players are a great example of a type of app that at first brush seems simple and difficult to do badly, but in reality is littered with subtleties and bits that hinge on the preferences of the user, all of which can make or break the app. Makes it easy to understand why there’s more players than can be counted but few worth using.

That's because they all try to be more than they should be. I don't need or want a visualization option. I don't need or want an equalizer. I don't need or want a library. Those functions properly belong in other places or in the waste bin. My music library is on my filesystem and is sorted and arranged as I prefer. When I want to play an album I drag it over to MPC-HC. When I want to create a custom playlist, I open…

[deleted]

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#18
post #2

Some people I know love it but it just doesn't work for me in the way I use a music player. It's similar to foobar2000 in some ways which depending on your preferences can be good or bad. And the name is terrible. Strawberry is better for me but still kind of janky. Quod Libet and Rythmbox would seem closer to my ideal interface-wise, but scored massive own goals they seemingly will never recover from. How in 2025 mu…

I really miss Foobar2000 on Linux (I've tried it a few times with Wine, and was never impressed vs. running it natively on Windows), so this looks like it might be just up my alley - especially since it has custom tag support.

> (I've tried it a few times with Wine, and was never impressed vs. running it natively on Windows)

Really? I noticed it's slower to start up but other than that it seems the same. I use it pretty regularly because foobar components handle formats the others can't.

Other than that, I'd say Audacious is the closest Linux analogue to foobar2000. My one big gripe was freezing up for a bit when a stream cuts out (blocking socket?) but they fixed that.

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#19
DeaDBeeF has been my goto for a while now because it's the only linux music player with the extremely specific feature I used in winamp:

enqueue is an arbitrary list so you can have a playlist, leave it in order and/but/then play a song multiple times in a row. everyone else it's a toggle so you enqueue a song and then enqueue again and it removes it; if you want to listen to a song multiple times before moving on you have to add it to the actual playlist multiple times and I do not want to do that.

literally the only important feature to me in a music player.

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#20
post #2

Some people I know love it but it just doesn't work for me in the way I use a music player. It's similar to foobar2000 in some ways which depending on your preferences can be good or bad. And the name is terrible. Strawberry is better for me but still kind of janky. Quod Libet and Rythmbox would seem closer to my ideal interface-wise, but scored massive own goals they seemingly will never recover from. How in 2025 mu…

I really miss Foobar2000 on Linux (I've tried it a few times with Wine, and was never impressed vs. running it natively on Windows), so this looks like it might be just up my alley - especially since it has custom tag support.

Still using wine+foobar2000 as my music player here. The only issue I can think of is sometimes when when turning my screens off and back on, the UI might be glitched and need a restart.
Post reply on HN