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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

#141

Post by fainpul »

volemo wrote: post #134
fainpul wrote: post #48

I'm not thrilled by the music player options on Linux. I've tried many and found most of them awful. Even the author of this article notes negatives about all of the listed players, which I find unacceptable (except for Recordbox , I'll have to look at that). And these are their favorites out of 200 players! It's the typical problem of free software: bad UI. I use Music on macOS (disable the music store and it's fine…

> It's the typical problem of free software: bad UI. > I use Music on macOS I’m surprised to read this. While I have quite high tolerance for bad UI and don’t have my own opinion, I’ve heard many a Mac / iOS developer practically spit on Music.app design.

I've also read people have much hate for the Music app. But I think it boils down to 2 things:

1. In certain setups macOS tends to launch it automatically and in unwanted situations, for example when a headset autoconnects.

2. People are pissed about the annoying ad-like pushing of subscriptions and other stuff.

I don't have those problems. As mentioned, disabled "Apple Music" and "iTunes Store" and all that crap disappears from the UI. I also don't have a headset.

The good things:

- It integrates nicely into the OS (as you would expect from Apple's own apps).

- It's very flexible in the ways it displays your music. It has everything from a mini player with varying degrees of info display up to a full screen mode.

Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026

#142

Post by pjmlp »

hahn-kev wrote: post #115
b1temy wrote: post #61

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 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.

And for those paying for Qt, there is a compiler that partially generates C++ code out of QML.

https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtqml-qml-script-compiler.html

Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026

#143

Post by b1temy »

hahn-kev wrote: post #115
b1temy wrote: post #61

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 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.

Slint may be of interest to you, which is similar but is allegedly better in some ways. It was also made by former Qt team devs.

http://slint.dev/

Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026

#146

Post by starky »

This is frankly one of the areas of Linux that I'm most disappointed about. I tried a number of these options for local players and found them all to be terrible. Especially considering that I really like the specific layout I've used for well over a decade on Foobar2000. I actually ended up installing Foobar2000 through Wine because of my frustration, only to find that it wouldn't start reliably.

Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026

#147

Post by ksr »

Asking here because I'm lazy to do my own research:

Are there music players that allow searching by credit? E.g. albums produced by Rick Rubin, or tracks where Justin Adams plays guitar. This kind of information is usually available on Discogs or MusicBrainz.

Re: The state of Linux music players in 2026

#148

Post by estimator7292 »

tasuki wrote: post #95

The 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…

Alien indeed. I can't think of anyone I've known that when looking for an album wants "AC/DC's 1986 album" instead of "T.N.T."

For better or worse, lexicographic is the default human-facing ordering.

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