Shoutouts to Audacious https://audacious-media-player.org/
Been flying with Audacious and deadbeef for ages. Minimalistic but quick and effective.
The state of Linux music players in 2026
81–90 of 159 posts
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#82Ohhh I just remembered Amarok!
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#83My friend made this site to try and surface the best place to buy music: https://streamtoshelf.com/
He also made a section of the site that allowed you to login via Spotify and it would aggregate your listening history and tell you how much it would cost to buy all of your most listened to albums. Annoyingly Spotify seems to restrict the oauth app creation process, so users have to be invited by email to access that.
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#84I like Amberol's approach - no library management, just use the file-system. I use Picard to organise my music into a sensible directory structure, and so Amberol can see that and play by album or artist. It's really nice.
It's crippled by its ridiculous refusal to see symbolic links. I want to use symlinks to create "playlists", without having to copy music files around, but now, to Amberol, it's as though sym-links don't exist.
I looked into it, and it's down to weird Gnome and Flatpak policies, which are bizarrely averse to sym-links, because they are a "security risk". Yes, that's kind of true if you are root, but who runs their music player as root???
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#85Not mentioned in the article, so I'd like to give a shout-out to cmus. https://cmus.github.io/ For all my fellow terminal friends <3
yes, GUI players come and go, cmus stays.
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess is not everyone is annoyed by that, or knows about the option. It was a nice surprise of qmmp, it switches to the next song without an extra pause. I use it with a winamp skin from https://archive.org/details/winampskins , to add to the options. Not sure about streaming support, I use it with local files.
> My guess is not everyone is annoyed by that, or knows about the option. It depends on the genre, I’d guess. For metal, there’s rarely continuous songs, mainly sometimes intro -> 1st proper song.
maybe not metal but the whole Offspring - Americana has this thing
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#87I'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 ove…
I remember struggling with it in the beginning (it has some quirks in the UI and how you configure folders and what have you) but once I got a hang on it it was pretty good
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#88I went the other way. I just want to shuffle all my songs or a playlist (m3u) without any of the other crap. Add and remove favourites. Album-focused players are a non-starter. Players without a simple global search box are a non starter.
Ended up 80% vibe coding one in Qt (PySide6) in a couple of evenings that does everything I want, exactly how I want. Added lyric fetching via LIBLRC (saved to .lrc files - no proprietary databases) and register as a music player with DBUS so it can be controlled. Working really well.
It's 2026, anyone who is unhappy with their player can pretty quickly LLM their way into adding any missing functionality or tweak behaviour they don't like, or just make a whole new player.
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#89Imo last good Linux player was... XMMS.
Never understood why it went away from most distributions forever.
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#90I'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 ove…
I don't use it much, but for a default audio player for KDE, it's surprisingly slow to open audio file just to play it once (around a second on my machine)