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The state of Linux music players in 2026

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Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026

#61

Post by b1temy »

I'm surprised the author didn't list KDE's Elisa: https://apps.kde.org/elisa/ Especially since they referenced KDE when they voiced their wish for Strawberry to be more modernized to match the appearance of KDE's Plasma desktop.

I haven't used it for a while (I generally don't listen to music outside of my drive to work these days), but I remember it being a pleasant replacement for MusicBee when I first switched over to a Linux distro full-time, coming from Windows. The Elisa UI is nice too imo, though it's more of a "native UI" look compared to some of the others in the list, though which style is nicer is up to personal preference.

It may also be a plus to some that it is not using Electron , and uses Qt instead (Well, apparently it uses QML, so still kind-of using ECMAScript/Javascript. But only for the user interface, and not the main business logic.)

Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026

#62

Post by internet_points »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #14

TBH the only thing I care for (except maybe for playlist management) is gapless playback. There's no word about it, but I constantly find out that the new players do not really care about the gap, while the music I am listening to is always ripped from my personal CDs and they mostly have music continuing on two or more tracks. Why nobody cares about it? Do you know this feeling when you get towards the High Hopes on…

There is a music player called Gapless that might help :) https://github.com/neithern/g4music

Also https://github.com/vicrodh/qbz for Qobuz supports gapless playback

Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026

#63

Post by aarroyoc »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #24
hofrogs wrote: post #21

Strawberry is a really good one.

I tried using Strawberry a couple years ago. It suffered from a bug where every so often, playback just stops. (Another bug was that the album art Strawberry displays is a severely downscaled, and then enlarged-with-obvious-pixelation, version of the art embedded in the file. It would be easier, and look better, to just display the embedded art.) Shortly after I reported this, they decided they wanted to turn into a…

It is still GPL, it is still free software, the source code is there. Only the Windows and macOS binaries are behind a paywall, but you can build yourself the binaries, or use it on Linux. RedHat does this and is "an example of free software monetization", Strawberry does it "and it should no longer be called free software".

Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026

#64

Post by apopapo »

maqp wrote: post #3

Something that wasn't mentioned in the article - if you're coming from Windows and using Foobar2000, you'll want DeadBeeF https://deadbeef.sourceforge.io/

All these players will never dethrone DeadBeeF's interface. Foobar2000 simply has the perfect layout - and it's customizable.

Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026

#65

Post by qrobit »

I was surprised not to find cantata[1], another MPD graphical client, on the list. Used it for the past three years, despite it being unmaintained for quite some time now. The client is very featureful, allows downloading lyrics and covers automatically (TBF had many mismatches, like downloading some Gillette ad as an Eminem's album cover). Most important to me is the ability to listen do directories and not artists/albums, which cantata does perfectly. Recently nixpkgs replaced cantata with a fork[2], so cantata is kind of online again.

[1]: https://github.com/CDrummond/cantata

[2]: https://github.com/nullobsi/cantata

Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026

#69

Post by rpnop94 »

squigz wrote: post #55
rpnop94 wrote: post #41

None of the current solutions work for someone like me. I have multiple versions of the same album so the UI needs to incorporate labels, catalog numbers, etc. and the playlists need to accommodate disc subtitles and grouping. The only two players that allow me this functionality are both on Windows so there's little available for the collectors such as myself.

Which players on Windows are you talking about?

MusicBee and foobar2000 with the old SimPlaylist plugin.

Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026

#70

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

Oh this is a funny topic; I just found myself looking for a decent music player on linux like a month or so ago and the situation was... disappointing.

The nicest looking one I could find was amberol, but that was a bit too minimalistic for me. I like minimal UIs but that doesn't have to translate to minimal feature sets as well.

But in the end I didn't find any simple but hackable players that I liked; in the end I just settled on audacious because it's just simple enough in terms of UI and good enough in terms of features. I do like the playlists as tabs idea though.

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