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I tried out most (if not all) of the music players on flathub, but I always end up going back to Rhythmbox. It's so simple, lightweight, got just enough features (for my use case) and blends well with GTK Desktops (I mostly use Gnome and Cinnamon) and it looks so clean in my Nord theme π
How has your experience with Rhythmbox? do y'all got any alternative you think everybody should give a try? I personally think Elisa is a close second!
I really just want a media player that:
Has good media library support based on tags (lots do)
Has ReplayGain support (lots do)
Lets me have an album art panel bigger than a thumbnail (and here is where so many options fall short, including Rhythmbox)
Deadbeef seems to be the closest due to its good customizability, but the plugin which allows for actual media library capability is apparently Mac-only, for some unfathomable reason.
Gonna be stuck with Foobar via Wine for a fair sight longer, I think.
I used it on Mint. I liked it. I use Strawberry now because it can bypass software decoding and output audio directly to my DAC.
Cider, apple music
@merci3 Just a very solid player. Linux music players come and go but Rhythmbox has always been there.
It literally hasnβt changed even a tiny bit since I first saw it in 2006 :)
I currently use Strawberry - a well maintained fork of the old Amarok player before they redone the UI for KDE 4. It does what I care the most:
I just went on a journey looking at different local music players.
Just tried Rhythmbox. It's not terrible, but not great either. It looks very bare bones.
Of the ones I've tried, I like Elisa the best. I spent a ton of time getting HQ artwork and quality metadata on my files and Elisa really shows that off. Rhythmbox barely shows any artwork. I just have two complaints about Elisa. First, Qt apps just don't feel right in Gnome for various reasons: fonts are often too thick, icon contrast is bad, and Qt theme is weird for non-Breze. It also has weird scrolling behavior: it has forced scrolling smoothing and acceleration.
Runner up is Sayonara. It's Qt based, but actually feels decent in Gnome. Overall I like the UI more than Elisa, but unfortunately it doesn't handle showing my library as well. Artwork is duplicated (it shows albums multiple times if songs in them have different years) and some artwork is inexplicably missing.
I really enjoyed Elisa too! It looks modern and does a great job at showing off metadata π
But I still sticked with Rhythmbox because of: 1- it's GTK based, and I'm currently on Gnome (the reason why when using KDE, I stick with Elisa) 2- I kinda did not understand how managing playlist in Elisa works? Maybe I missed something, but Rhythmbox just seemed more simple and direct to the point with that.
But yeah, I do agree with you that Rhythmbox really lacks in the "showing album covers off" space. But in my personal usage, I don't tend to be looking at the UI of the music player on the desktop anyway, since I usually just play music on the background while doing other stuff.
On mobile (android) on the other hand, I'm enjoying Gramophone for not only showing larger covers, but also matching it's own Material You colors to the respective music you're playing, it's neat :p
Just felt the need to say our music libraries look very similar. You have great taste.
I use mpd and ncmpc++, myself. My library got too large (Just shy of 70,000 songs now) and all the GUI players choke and freeze when I try to scan my library, including Rhythmbox and QuodLibet. I'm kind of interested in how inori develops, since ncmpc++ isn't getting any active development beyond fixing bugs when things break with updates, but I'm also pretty happy with it for now.
I just read that navidrome
Handles large libraries!
Plays well with gigantic music collections (tested with ~900K songs - 2/3 FLAC, 1/3 MP3)
Though, I don't know if any of the supported Subsonic API clients can handle as much...
I've been enjoying Tauon, it does the things I want
Clementine was the best
I use strawberry now, which is a clementine derivative. Having my library in one column on the side and just pulling stuff from the library to a variable custom playlist is my preferred player style. Exaile is also like this, and deadbeef too if your library is organized and you add the filebrowser plugin. I use strawberry over those two because it's the only one I can get from the main arch repositories and I try to minimize AUR usage.
Pragha actually fits this style too and is still in the arch repos, but I don't understand why because it stopped getting upstream updates years ago and is a buggy mess compared to strawberry with no advantages.
I definitely miss the clementine remote though, being able to control the player from an android phone was so convenient and I don't know any other player that has similar.
being able to control the player from an android phone was so convenient and I don't know any other player that has similar.
Well, you can remote control playback in Kodi through apps like Kore, and browse the libraries, but it's a totally different experience in comparison to dedicated music player apps. Kodi is more like software for a home theater PC, a.k.a. media center.
The best viable solution I can think of, that includes a desktop UI and remote control from a phone, would be hosting a Jellyfin server for the music library, then using the client app for Android to remotely control another client app running on your desktop. I do that everyday (but mostly for video content), since I'm using my phone to control playback on a Raspberry Pi running Kodi with the "Jellycon" client add-on, but that could be any other Jellyfin client, such as a regular Jellyfin desktop client.
Yeah, I wasn't considering kodi and jellyfin as music players because they serve a broader purpose than that, but I guess they should count. I do have jellyfin set up for movies and shows, but I've stuck with strawberry for music because the player interface is a bigger priority for me than having a remote is.
can anyone suggest a tool to re-assess all my ripped mp3s and flacs with artist/track title info? I ripped ages of music from CD, and at some point a lot of the data got dicked up.
Are there any music players that will play my mp3s and stuff but also let me play audio from youtube or spotify without logging in? On android I use Musify, which does this but is a little wonky.
Lightweight? I guess things have changed in the last 15+ years... I personally settled on Sayonara. Then I discovered Nuclear. Still undecided.
It's an amazing music player and shit podcast app
I like Strawberry, for two reasons:
It was the first player I found that supported playing directly to a pipewire sink, without going through the Pulseaudio compatibility layer.
It can stream hi res FLAC files from Tidal.
I never managed to make Tidal work. How did you do it?
+1 β I tried getting the gosh darn API key for hours with no success. Share your secrets (original commenter)!
I'm just going to use this opportunity to publicly grieve again for Winamp fake becoming open-source: https://hackaday.com/2024/10/16/winamp-taken-down-too-good-for-this-open-source-world/
Cantata.
Same here. Nothing even comes close, at least in my opinion - it's comparable to foobar2000.
@WeAreAllOne @merci3 That's my current player of choice on KDE. Sadly it's no longer maintained. Hopefully some fork will succeed
I think I've read somewhere that there still is maintenance but can't find it now. In any case Cantata works perfectly!
TIL rhythmbox still exists.
If you are an audiophile, nothing beat QuodLibet right now.
Oooh, I'll have to check this one out. I still dualboot Windows for a couple of things and one of the things I've been missing a lot is a player as good as MusicBee. Strawberry comes pretty close, but not quite. Luckily I've found that MusicBee works really well through Bottles, but I would prefer to use a native application.
Elisa is also decent if you use KDE, QuodLibet is more on the customizable side.
Rhythmbox has been my main music app for over 15 years now. Every now and then I'll check out other options but I always end up back after a couple days.
I do wish they would give the UI some attention. Nothing major, just a few visual tweaks to bring it inline with modern Gnome (the alternative toolbar plugin is really close)
Same, I just really want the automatic playlists feature, but no other music players that look nice on gnome seem to have that. Pretty much all newish players are so minimal
I've been a Linux user since 2005ish and a DJ since at least 2013. I've tried a lot of music players including Rythmbox. I settled on Clementine/Strawberry or Amorok, depending on use case. Haven't used either of them recently.
With that said, there is no right answer. Find one you like!
I'd rather use Lollypop.
I am also a fan. Nicely shows album art, and has the "play similar" feature which I find to be very useful. I just pick one album I know I want to listen to, and it chooses the subsequent albums.
Love Rhythmbox! I used it way way back when I first installed Ubuntu (back when it was good) and it was part of a special nostalgic feeling of having been ushered into this new linux world, and I think it lets you rate your songs 1-5 stars (if you want) and I had a lot of fun doing that.
I prefer Quod Libet but I have fond memories of rhythmbox.
I also use Rhythmbox, the UI is clean and simple. Other music players either are too complicated (UI has too much clutter, play queues) or want to automatically import all audio files in my home directory into the library, which is annoying. But to be fair, I haven't tried a lot of other players, because I'm happy using Rhythmbox.
Absolutely classic music player. The iTunes 1.0 UI pattern, which was pre-enshittification. To my eyes, I still donβt think Iβve ever seen a more overall efficient and descriptive way of browsing a local music library.