Mine is Strawberry since it has a ton of options and plays a ton of formats. It’s also (distant) fork of Amarok 1.4 and integrates well with KDE Plasma. I’m curious what other people are using these days. What’s your favorite player?
dd if=/dev/urandom | aplay
So you like jazz?
Only free jazz
I was about to suggest of=/dev/dsp, but that devnode doesn’t seem to be in use anymore
First it was Amarok, then Clementine, and now it’s Strawberry.
I use Clementine because it lets me rate my songs. Does Strawberry do that? If it does I’ll give it a try.
Strawberry is basically a fork of Clementine from when it was abandoned.
I had no idea clementine I as abandoned! I wasn’t paying close attention. Time to jump to strawberry
Ditto. It’ll be interesting to see what improvements there are. But mostly I use Shuttle on my phone to listen
Edit: https://wiki.strawberrymusicplayer.org/wiki/Differences_from_Clementine
The only thing dropped that I might have used is artist info.
VLC
yes, VLC for gui, cmus for cli.
nvlc/ vlc -I ncurses for cli.
As a bonus: also runs on my phone.
VLC
mpv
I also mostly use VLC these days. I also use it on android, with a copy of my flac library on my microSD there too.
vim
Mom: switch that off!
Kid: I can’t!
Emacs
Agreed, with the exception of album covers. I like it all to look nice on my Hidizs when I’m on the go.
How do you discover new music? I’m the type that listen to the same thing over and over again but I realized even I rely entirely on autogenerated playlists of Spotify.
Sometimes I poke around Wikipedia and see what other artists collaborated with, influenced, or were influenced by artists I like, and buy their albums.
Sometimes I download highly-rated shows from random artists on Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive
Sometimes friends recommend stuff.
How do you download your music?
My client doesn’t have to answer that.
Almost got him
If the artist has a way to buy and download from their website, I do that. Otherwise I buy CDs or vinyl and rip them.
More of a gmpc kinda person. Unless there’s a better GUI for mpd out there?
There’s always mpdas for scrobbling
I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you that spotify sucks, they hate artists but love Joe Rogan. If you can’t buy albums via bandcamp, Tidal offers quality and royalties far superior to Spottily. You can transfer your playlist in a few clicks and the price is almost identical (6 accounts for like $15/m).
One Swedish company for another. Joke aside, isn’t the whole problem with royalties in the music scene still the issue that the record labels taking 90% of profits?
Thr issue with spotify I have is only one. Its pretty good at predicting new songs with radio that I may like and I usually use the radio feature as I dont like to repeat my own playlists over and over.
Tidal’s algorythm is excellent for suggestions and the radio feature works well. I wasn’t sure at first but after a few months of listening to my stuff, Tidal strated to get really good at suggestions. My only issue left is how picky the search engine is Any spelling mistake will get you no results, but I can live with that. I work in studio environnement so getting access to uncompressed master files is huge for me.
I gave it a short try just to see if my fav artists are there. Yes. Didnt expect this. Also feels much more serious than spotify. I will see if the algorithm does its job.
Its weird how at first it only displayed music I would never listen to or is not near the artists I selected at the beginning. I guess I need to listen and favoritize them. And wait?..
Edit: It got a bit better over time. But there are a few songs still missing on Tidal 💀
Tidal sucks for EDM. Trance and progressive in particular.
But didn’t they had the issue with supporting MQA, which kinda was a scam? As far as I know they now switched to FLAC, but it still feels a bit weird.
Yeah MQA felt indeed bit of a weird for a lossy codec. FLAC is a real lossless format that’s been around for a long time, I’m glad they now use it. I like the fact that Tidal can be set to different quality on wi-fi vs phone data. Anyway, Tidal is still a buisness with only profit as a goal, but they give 3 times more to artists. Best way to support artist will always be by going to shows and buying albums and merchs, but most people wants a streaming sevice so IMO Tidal is the best right now. One day maybe Funkwhale or another decentralized option will offer a real revenu model for artists.
MPD + ncmpcpp, I hate both and I’m yet to find anything better.
mpd is the best music player on any system
I’ve started using Cantata as a graphical front end, though
I feel this. If you could right click to interact with the text objects, then this combo would basically feel like foobar2000 for linux. I’m old enough to have missed how great foobar2000 felt after WinAmp started to get bloated (back before I got my hands on some Linux ISOs), so MPD + ncmpcpp just felt so refreshingly stripped down and a little nostalgic. I just fucking hate having to memorize a bunch of non-intuitive hotkey combos to do anything. Probably the same reason I’ve never bothered to properly learn Vim.
I’m an Emacs graybeard, so complex keybindings don’t scare me. My problem with ncmpcpp is twofold:
- It relies on MPD which is always a PITA to properly configure. Pulseaudio always managed to make it not work on a fresh system. Hopefully with Pipewire it’ll be better.
- The config format make no sense whatsoever. Especially the one with keybindings. It’s so cryptic I just stopped trying to understand it. Again, I’m an Emacs graybeard, to stress it as a point of reference.
MPD + ncmpcpp, I hate both and I’m yet to find anything better.
I’m an Emacs graybeard
Emacs does have a music player, emms, which is what I use.
M-x package-install RET emms RET
I’m aware but thank you. I’ve tried it before and didn’t like it. Maybe I’ll give it another shot, though I don’t see much benefit in tying my music player to Emacs.
I tried several and I very much appreciate Quod Libet
That said I’m interested in trying others’ suggestions 👌
mpv --no-video --shuffle
DeaDBeeF Player, I like lightweight and simple music players.
My fave too as it’s closest to foobar, critically with the tagging interface I prefer. Have you added any additional plugins to your install? I tried adding a few (music library, Discord Rich Presence) but must be the right sort of stupid not to understand the instructions. facepalm
About 2 years ago, I moved my music to Jellyfin and have been using their media players on every platform I use (iOS, FireTV, Ubuntu, and Windows). At this point my music library is close to 200 GB, kinda hard to store that much on every device I own.
Quod Libet
Still awesome!
Yeah, put me down for Strawberry too. I used to use Rhythmbox up until mid 2023, I started to get into high res music and I got a tidal subscription, so switched to Strawberry.
Can Strawberry interface with iPods?
Yes
Tauon Music Box. I just point it at my Navidrome instance and hit shuffle usually.
I’ve been using Tauon for years now and I still love it.