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/
I'll throw out Fooyin for QT
thanks I'll have to test this out!
The state of Linux music players in 2026
111–120 of 159 posts
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#112I 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 propr…
I did the same for a media player with filtering. Works very well!
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#113One more vote for FOOBAR2000 under WINE.
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#114Shoutouts to Audacious https://audacious-media-player.org/
Always used audacious, does everything I need. Is fast, native (gtk or Qt), and you can save playlists.
On the music management side of things, I always feel like files and folders are the way to go.
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#115I'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…
Man QML is awesome, it's all native UI, and since it's not a browser it has a much simper runtime available for the js that you write.
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#116Imo last good Linux player was... XMMS. Never understood why it went away from most distributions forever.
> Never understood why it went away from most distributions forever. CADT. "Because of the release of GNOME 2.0 and 2.2, and the lack of interest in maintainership of GNOME 1.4, the gnome-core product is being closed. If you feel your bug is still of relevance to GNOME 2, please reopen it and refile it against a more appropriate component. Thanks... " Xmms uses gtk 2 i think. GTK is now at version 4 or 5.
Someone have those cool AI code tools? Perfect job for a rewrite haha
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#117The thing I don't understand is alphabetic ordering of albums, which is the default most everywhere. Albums of a particular artist should obviously be ordered by when they were released (I don't care whether from newest or from oldest). It appears I'm an alien: almost none of the music players' authors care about this - they happily show albums from A to Z. I use Clementine which can be set up to order albums by year…
Jellyfin can order albums by year, though I assume many readers of this thread are looking for a self contained player rather than client/server setup like Jellyfin.
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#118The thing I don't understand is alphabetic ordering of albums, which is the default most everywhere. Albums of a particular artist should obviously be ordered by when they were released (I don't care whether from newest or from oldest). It appears I'm an alien: almost none of the music players' authors care about this - they happily show albums from A to Z. I use Clementine which can be set up to order albums by year…
It's probably not gonna help you, but that's possible in Music (macOS). There are two sorting criteria, so you could choose to sort by artist first, then for each album of a given artist sort by year. Or you can sort all albums by year, then inside each year alphabetically (album or artist) if that's what you meant. It's a simple option to implement. But most developers without UI skills don't seem to think about stu…
The problem with that is that things like remasters, special editions, etc. screw up the timeline. Those are listed when they came out but that means they are not in original releases order any longer.
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#119On Windows i have used foobar2000 since i had a crt monitor that got too dark for winamp so about 20 years. In 2 years daily using Steam Deck as my main computing device and trying almost every linux music player. I settled on using a spare android phone running Symfonium + Navidrome on Raspberry pi. As nothing on linux comes close.
Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026
#120JRiver is an advanced media player that works cross platform including Linux. It isn’t the prettiest thing around and understanding everything that it can do can be frustrating but it will do just about anything you’d like a media player to do.
I rarely interact with it directly. I usually use JRemote on my iPad or iPhone to control it. There is also an incredibly fast web front end you can use in whatever device you want.
Does the old Logitech music server (or whatever it is called these days) work on Linux? There have been a bunch of front end programs to use those servers.