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DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

deadbeef.sourceforge.io

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Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#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 music players refuse to (not can't, refuse to) get "Album Artist" right blows my mind.

Since I subscribe to Plex I find I'm using Plexamp more than anything else, but that's not really open source.

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#3
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.

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#4
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…

> Strawberry is better for me but still kind of janky

Strawberry isn't the most solid program (a few times a year, its search hiccups and gets stuck for a few seconds), but it carries the torch of Clementine's UX - which is my ideal music listening experience.

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#5
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…

> How in 2025 music players refuse to (not can't, refuse to) get "Album Artist" right blows my mind

Apple Music on macOS broke album artist (click the artist column a few times) a few releases ago and you now have to resort it on every launch. Maddening. They then added an explicit “sort by album artist” column which… does not work.

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#6
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…

>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

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#7
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…

>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.

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#8
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.

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#9
DeaDBeef isn’t my primary player, but it does have some interesting capabilities that I use it for from time to time such as the ability to list chaptered AAC files as separate tracks (making it easier to navigate them).

The way it supports alternative UIs by way of its plugin system is interesting too. It’s neat to have a native GTK UI under a GNOME desktop, native Qt UI under KDE, and native AppKit UI under macOS with the same program.

Re: DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

#10
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 have tried A LOT of different music players over the years on Linux and the amount of ones that do not offer a single easy way to find a given album by a given artist is truly maddening.

I have recently landed on Tauon which has a pretty particular UI that is pretty unlike most others, but after some getting used to worked well for me. Audacious is mostly fine as well, but at some point I did not want to use it anymore because it would just stop responding to MPRIS events too often

For remote playing I have been really enamoured with Navidrome (in combination with Symfonium) lately. It's not super pretty, but it really has the best organization of albums I have seen so far and I kinda just dont use it for local files, because I dont want to do everything in the browser...

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