DeaDBeeF – A modular audio player for Unix-like systems

I sigh every time someone says deadbeef is great alternative to foobar2000. The greatest thing about foobar2000 is media library which deadbeef doesn't even have. Actually, no other player on the planet can compete with foobar's media library. I'm not sure what kind of magic it uses, but the second I put new files in directories where my music is, foobar2000 sees it and I can access it in foobar. Sometimes, I listen to a random track and decide I want to hear everything from this artist that I have in library. I press 'a' on a selected track and I see everything from this artist. I press 'A' on a track and I get everything from this album. I press 'q', type few letters in search bar, press enter and I get new playlist with the results. I press 'o' on a track and it opens a file explorer in the location where the track is located and it also selects it. Quite useful if I want to move it somewhere else or copy it or rename or whatever. These are all my custom shortcuts but I love the fact that you can assign shortcut to virtually anything. There's also tag editor and format converter. There's also really cool feature that you can queue any file you double click in file explorer in its own playlist (I call this playlist Inbox), so that the playlist I'm currently listening is unmodified.

Closest thing I found on Linux is ncmpcpp and it's still a far cry from everything I can do in foobar2000.

How is the tagging system in DeaDBeef? My music library has grown exponentially in the past year or so, due to boredom during covid, and I've come to the conclusion that playlists (as in, static lists of music files that you need to update manually) are functionally useless for large libraries.

What I've been looking for, but so far haven't been able to find, is a system that creates playlists from queries to my music database, based on tags I assign to individual songs. Even better if I can use a logic programming / query language like Datalog to help simplify tagging! For instance, if I have songs with the following tags:

  (Song 1) japan 1971 japanese jazz funk fusion female
  (Song 2) japan 2004 instrumental math-rock
  (Song 3) japan 1983 japanese enka female
  (Song 4) korea 1983 japanese rock male
  (Song 5) brazil 1973 spanish jazz instrumental
  (Song 6) mali 1979 blues rock folk tuareg
  (Song 7) algeria 1974 french folk

I should be able to define logic rules that make tagging easier. Ideally, the tagging system should automatically write any deduced tags as metadata for the original files (for compatibility with other music players), with some way to keep track of which tags were added automatically vs manually, in case the deduction rules change.

  asia(x) :- japan(x) OR korea(x) or ...
  africa(x) :- algeria(x) OR egypt(X) OR ...
  latin(x) :- mexico(x) OR brazil(x) or ...
  rock(x) :- math-rock(x)
  etc

I should be able to create playlists from the following queries that automatically update themselves when I add new music:

  (playlist 1) ?- language(x,"french") AND region(x, "africa") AND (1960 < year < 1970)
  (playlist 2) ?- region(x,"asia") AND genre(x,"rock")

Apologies for the inconsistent syntax, but hopefully you get the rough idea. Does anything like this exist? The built-in Rhythmbox music player for linux has decent support for saving playlists based on tags, but there's no built-in system for logic programming based on tags.

DeadBeeF is probably the best nix-first GUI player out there, but even though it's not a new project, some parts of the UI still seriously lag behind Foobar2000.

Some wishes from me, from memory:

- You can't use more than one scrobbling service simultaneously.

- You can't tweak parameters of burnt-in converter settings

- You can't easily switch the language of the interface (It just drives me nuts when software and internet pages assume the language)

I'm a big DeaDBeeF user on mac, and it has reasonable Cocoa UI (so it looks and feels native!) - this is actually pretty unusual for players on the platform!

I make a few tweaks (it's open source, so you can!), but it is very pleasant to use and lets me treat my music as just a collection of playlists rather than railroading me into a big complicated media library tracking system.

Additionally, the main developer is pretty active and it is getting a lot of love in bugfixes and updates for newer macOS, and pull requests and issues get actively looked at as well.

edit: oh, and the codebase was quite nice and easy for me to dig into as well :)

Happy long-term user here. I switched to DeaDBeeF from foobar2k shortly after I made the move to desktop Linux a good decade ago, since fb2k only ran very awkwardly in Wine at the time.

One advantage of DB is how simple and elegant its plugin API is. I remember fb2k's being the worst of the early-2000s high corporate C++ style (with a thicket of templated factory classes that were completely opaque to debuggers and IDEs); in comparison, DB's is a straightforward plain C interface with nary an unnecessary moving part.

I used to be a huge foobar2000 fan with a huge FLAC library. A bit later I got used to iTunes, because there was no good foobar2000 alternative on macOS, and I dialed back the library. Then I said fuck it and moved all the way over to Spotify, trading music quality (and UI) for discoverability. And I don't see myself going back.

Nothing came close to the Foobar conversion interface. I didn't have to bother with splitting album flac files, tagging, picking v0/v2/v3, everything just a click away once it's inside Foobar.

I've been using Flacon, MusicBrainz and a combination of shntools but Foobar experience was miles ahead.

Will give this one a try.

Happy long-term user here. I'm probably one of the few people who have an extended mp3 collection in "physical files" (is that a thing nowadays?) stored on a physical hard drive, some of which I actually grabbed myself from CD, casettes, even vinyl. I've never used iTunes or any online streaming service. If I need something I don't have on my disk, I just go to Youtube.

In the late 90s I was a happy Winamp user, because back then it was just a player and not much else. Deadbeef is exactly that, it works perfectly under linux (KDE), it is very unobtrusive, can be controlled by the media keyboard buttons if needed, in general, it just gets out of the way and does one thing and one thing well (play music, that is, preferably in the background).

When I switched to Linux, I installed Wine just so I can use foobar2000. The main things I wanted was multiple playlists, shuffle (which should remain in that order until changed again - one of the reasons to shift from other players) and play again exactly from where it was left off on a reboot.

Once I came to know about deadbeef and found these features were present, I switched to it.

All I could think about when I saw the title was 0xDEADBEEF:

> 0xDEADBEEF or 3735928559 is frequently used to indicate a software crash or deadlock in embedded systems. 0xDEADBEEF was originally used to mark newly allocated areas of memory that had not yet been initialized—when scanning a memory dump, it is easy to see the 0xDEADBEEF. It is used by IBM RS/6000 systems, Mac OS on 32-bit PowerPC processors and the Commodore Amiga as a magic debug value. On Sun Microsystems' Solaris, it marks freed kernel memory. The DEC Alpha SRM console has a background process that traps memory errors, identified by PS as "BeefEater waiting on 0xdeadbeef".[1]

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/DEADBEEF.html

Looks great, foobar2000 was my player of choice many years ago on Windows.

But these days I prefer the simplicity of mpv even for audio. It supports most audio formats, M3U playlists and HTTP, since I don't keep music locally anymore, and shows metadata and album art just fine, with a consistent UI across platforms and very lightweight on resources. Turns out I don't need much more than that.

It's even extensible with Lua, so scrobbling is also supported: https://github.com/l29ah/w3crapcli/blob/master/last.fm/mpv-l... .

I have been looking for a good media player for m4a files with lots of tracks. This is the only one I have found that supports titles for all tracks correctly.

But there is no library right? No database? I've always used a library, so how do I switch? Example: I have 50k tracks, and I've been using MusicBee (in wine) up to now. That lets me search using any tag, including user-defined tags, like a multi-value "instrument" tag, multi-value "moods" tag etc. (And these tags don't just live in the database, they're written to the track file so the data is portable, and I'm not locked into MusicBee)

If DeaDBeeF has no library, how can I search for tracks that have mood tag "uplifting" and instrument tag "piano"? How do I create smart playlists based on some combination of rating, last played, moods, genres and instruments? My guess is, it can't. Or if it can, it's via adding all of my tracks to a playlist, waiting for the metadata to load up, and then search. Have I got that right?

For me, foobar2k was never really about the UI. It was about the audio engine. It was the only player at the time I could trust to just do the right thing. Whenever I have tried any "fb2k-like" players they have only focussed on the UI but have the same shoddy audio engine as everything else. Is this any different?

Looks amazing! I really miss foobar2000 for its album organization possibilities - but at the same time I don't miss having to maintain mp3 files on my hard drive, so I'm still contempt enough with Spotify even though its interface is designed for a completely different target audience than me.

I used Foobar2000 for years in order to keep using OzoneMP after Winamp had fallen off the wagon. Based on what I remember of the software license for plugins (modified BSD with a no reverse engineering clause added if I recall correctly), it seemed clear that the devs felt that there was some secret property to their implementation that they wanted to protect. It wasn't obvious to me what that was, though, beyond maybe replaygain or floating point audio. Was there something specific? Does DeaDBeeF player also provide this alleged advantage?

In the same idea of "foobar2k clone", I used Foobnix when I was using linux as my main OS: http://foobnix.com/en/index.html.

deadbeef is good. took a lot of setting up to get it the way I like it.

I always found things to nitpick about music players, at least with deadbeef you fight with the layout editor then you have noone to nitpick but yourself

Could anyone comment on how deadbeef compares to audacious on Linux?

winamp succesor? how's it do with reskins?

I’m surprised Spotify didn’t kill people’s music libraries.