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Comment by raffraffraff | Hacker News Reader

I use Wine for one thing: running MusicBee. It's a pain in the ass to get it working 100%. Every time I've tried to upgrade past wine 4.x it completely breaks my MusicBee wine prefix, so I've locked the version and will never upgrade. Ultimate goal is to wait until any native Linux music player is even 10% as good as MusicBee.

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MusicBee was one thing I looked over in my switch to Linux a couple months ago. In my head, I could simply find any other music player for Linux and be on with my life. But I found that MusicBee had so much ancillary functions that had made their way into my music management flows over the years that were lacking in other players. I still haven't bothered to find another player, but I have been working on creating new flows using beets, which is probably a better approach as it separates the concerns of managing and playing my music.

I used to have this problem, I ended up stopping using MusicBee. I found Sayonara to be a near 100% replacement. https://sayonara-player.com/

I know I tried it and uninstalled it. Gonna try it again and let you know why I'm uninstalling it again (because I forget)

Which features do you desire? What is your ideal music player?

1. Main music browser pane should be in column format (think: "excel spreadsheet" with configurable columns of metadata), with a search bar that filters on any visible column or advanced metadata search.

2. Separate "Now playing" pane so I can browse in the main page without affecting what is currently playing (lots of players break this). It's basically a separate, anonymous playlist.

3. Support for custom id3 tags. These have been around for decades but only have limited support. Some players do a half assed job, others don't bother at all, some don't even support the "comment" field. MusicBee let's me define tags and use them as columns in the music browser, Now Playing view, smart playlists, searches etc.

That's it. Decent playlist management would be great but I don't find MusicBee particularly outstanding here either. What I'd like is the ability to tag my playlists with the year, moods and comments - like virtual compilation albums.

I don't use my music player for stupid visualisations. I don't care about lyrics or album art. It's 100% about finding music and creating a play queue. If I like the queue I can save it as a new playlist. That's it.

Quodlibet isnt exactly a 1:1 replacement, but Im very happy with it. You might give it a try.

Tried it. Didn't like the ui. More importantly it doesn't let me browse my extended id3 tags so it's basically useless to me.

Spotify runs fine on Linux and you'll free up a ton of disk space!

The economics don't work for me. I already have a large collection. Disk space is cheap (practically free). Spotify costs money every month to play music I already own. Spotify also lacks certain songs (or versions of songs). If I stop paying for Spotify I keep nothing, but if I stop buying albums I keep everything I already own. Last time I checked, it didn't allow you to tag tracks. That may have changed, but I doubt it.

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