DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player
deadbeef.sourceforge.io
deadbeef.sourceforge.io
It's not on the plugins list because I haven't bothered trying to get it there. I don't think that list existed when I wrote this. I approached the author about upstreaming it instead, thinking it would be a good compliment to the builtin Game_Music_Emu plugin for emulating various old video game and computer audio chips. They seemed a bit upset that people didn't want to maintain external plugins, but actually I didn't really mind doing so. Maybe I should look into getting it on that list some day.
Either way, if streamed video game music formats are up your alley and you like DeaDBeeF, then shameless plug: https://github.com/jchv/deadbeef-vgmstream
It's not "ultimate" by any stretch, but it's a really good command-line mp3 player, and the one I use the most. It's been a long time since I've researched it, so there may be better ones out now.
The sync app is separate, free app just used for serving files to the mobile app for syncing though.
I also find that I never got into playlists, so something that can easily be coaxed to just swallow 100Gb of content and let me occasionally search for a specific track is my speed.
getmusicbee.com
The amount of visual flare that thing managed to produce in the heydays of WinXP was stunning, felt like operating a scifi-movie prop with all of the alphablended animations shooting out of the player window at times.
I just don't like the cover art manager, everything else is jut right for me.
(I'm writing this as a disapproving old geezer, just in case it wasn't clear.)
None of the OSS media players come even remotely close to the UX of Spotify, and that's speaking as someone who has paid way too much for Roon because it's at least 80% of the way there.
My main issue with Spotify is how bloated it is, how they ruin the UX with almost every update.
I organize my mp3s into folders by genre, then named by artist - title. To play one I double click it from the system file browser, and just want a tiny, og winamp style player to open and play that one song. Or multi select for an instant playlist.
I see you don't know the challenges of disk access on Android for developers.
I think Android has now made this type of player almost obsolete. Every app has its own file sandbox and apps must go through an abstraction for media that works poorly.
You can also multiselect files or folders to open as a playlist, if that's your thing.
These days I use musicbee which has extremely customizable views, so you can browse your music however you want. My wife tends to pick a specific album, whereas I tend to be in a specific music mood so I hunt around for tracks and make a two hour playlist for it. She'd be happy with folders probably but it would kill me not to be able to search for instruments and moods. How else are you going to get a trumpet and piano playlist? Remember every song name?
I know it's crazy, but yes! Nothing drives me crazier than seeing an actor and trying to remember where I saw him/her in before, and hearing a song I know but don't know the name.
I use Shazam liberally but it's pretty bad at the non mainstream stuff. I end up finding it with searches and screenshotting it for my reference.
Not that you asked any of this, but I -have- to know the name of a song I like.
That's not to throw any shade on strawberry, it's also incredibly good, but foobar2000 will always have it's claws in me.
enqueue is an arbitrary list so you can have a playlist, leave it in order and/but/then play a song multiple times in a row. everyone else it's a toggle so you enqueue a song and then enqueue again and it removes it; if you want to listen to a song multiple times before moving on you have to add it to the actual playlist multiple times and I do not want to do that.
literally the only important feature to me in a music player.
If you have any windows boxes around, WACUP (WinAmp Community Update Project) is a recent-build of winamp without the bullshit. And includes the Enqueue feature.
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.
Really? I noticed it's slower to start up but other than that it seems the same. I use it pretty regularly because foobar components handle formats the others can't.
Other than that, I'd say Audacious is the closest Linux analogue to foobar2000. My one big gripe was freezing up for a bit when a stream cuts out (blocking socket?) but they fixed that.
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.
Compare Amarok 1.4: https://amarok.kde.org/files/amarok14/shot7.png
To Amarok 2.0 alpha 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110820190636/http://blog.lydia...
It was so widely disappointing that the “Amarok 2.0 FAQ” had an entry for “IMO Amarok 2.0 looks terrible” even though that's not a question lol https://web.archive.org/web/20090208231357/http://amarok.kde...
Luckily the Clementine project came along to deliver a straight port of Amazon 1.4 from Qt3 to Qt4 which was all 99% of people really wanted.
*James Rolfe voice* What were they thinking‽‽
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.
The name is just a piece of hacker lore from back in the day
The worst are when they pick a generic English word for a project that has nothing to do with that word. I'm not going to name and shame, but there are so many examples of new project that get posted to HN monthly that have irrelevant and unsearchable names. We see things like "Show HN: Banana - A lightweight URL parsing library in Rust". WTF does URL parsing have to do with bananas? How do you expect that word to be uniquely searchable back to your project??
But i totally get your point.
I'm wondering that if some random gibberish might even be better to name a project nowadays. At least there would be less SEO collision.
"Adoption of our Ogg Vorbis format isn't where we hoped it to be"
"Fork me on Git"
Yes, really:
https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/git.wiki.kernel.org/index...
It can go too far the other direction too, for example the generic names like Files, Phone, etc either preloaded on the device by the manufacturer (eg Samsung) or by Google, or some third party.
The worst is when an application's display name is different from its actual name. Like on my MATE desktop it took me years to fully internalize that “Files” is actually `caja` if I want to invoke it from a terminal. At least Nautilus was a type of shell lol
It is one of the most common words in the English language. It is also one of the most popular board games in the world, and it has nothing to do with it. It can mean plenty of other things, just look at the Wikipedia disambiguation page. It is enough of a problem that it is often called "golang" to make it more searchable.
And ironically, it is made by Google.
C is pretty terrible too, being a popular and extremely influential language with a one-letter name.
Makes it easy to understand why there’s more players than can be counted but few worth using.
Without going too far out into the weeds, lack of integration between filemanagers/filesystems and music players is the main problem. File managers aren’t conducive to sorting by audio file metadata - even those that support it force the user to manually enable those columns in list mode and support is spotty across file formats, meaning the user has to fall back on “hacks” like modifying filenames to sort properly when sorting by name.
Additionally, the browser-type design that’s dominant in file managers doesn’t lend to versatile use with other programs.
This is one area where I think BeOS had the right idea. There, audio metadata was accessible by way of the filesystem which made it easy to access by applications and meant that the file manager more robustly supported sorting by that metadata. Additionally, the file manager was similar to that of Classic Mac OS where windows were dead simple and each represented a single folder, which made it easy to use a file manager window as a playlist window.
Putting the equalizer upstream at the speaker level means that all of your audio is affected by it. And yet there are many times where I am playing certain types of music, such as classical or tracker impulse chiptune that needs some adjustments - i'd much rather be able to adjust it at the playlist and/or player level.
The advantage of a music player that builds a library from a set of folders is that it's infinitely faster to be able to do fuzzy searches particularly around metadata such as Idv3 tags.
Etc. etc.
How do you manage albums that could be classified as two or more genres?
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...
In Musium (https://docs.ruuda.nl/musium/) I also handle collaboration albums that have multiple album artists, based on Musicbrainz album artist id.
At the time, the developers claimed changing it to work as people would expect it to would break existing user workflows and so they wouldn't do it.
What are the own goals you speak of?
And many of the few that get "Album Artist" won't respect tags that set the sort order for it either. If you are lucky, they will at least special case "The" so that "The Beatles" are under B, but they'll still put John Denver under "J".
The only one I know of that gets both of these right is cmus; I don't choose to use a terminal-based music player, I'm forced to.
> Each platform’s native UI toolkit is employed to deliver the best experience
> GTK2, GTK3, ALSA and PulseAudio on Unix systems
If the author is here, please understand that there is no "native" UI toolkit for Linux or BSD. These platforms have several widely-used desktop environments, some of which use the Qt toolkit instead of Gtk.
For what it's worth, Qt is an excellent cross-platform toolkit, and does a far better job than Gtk at looking and feeling native across all the major desktop environments and operating systems. You might consider it instead of Gtk for future work.
You're wrong. When a library is native to some system, it does not mean that it is always shipped with the system. It means that it runs directly, without an interpretation layer in the runtime.
So GTK3 is native to Linux/Xorg. The desktop environment is irrelevant, and may not be based on GTK3.
To put it in practical context, apps built with Gtk generally stand out like sore thumbs on Qt-based desktops like KDE Plasma, both in the way they look and in the way their widgets respond to input. This rather undermines the app's claim "to deliver the best experience" with its choice of UI toolkit.
But if you like, go ahead and believe that I'm wrong instead of trying to understand.
And while it’s true that Qt fits into a GTK desktop better than the reverse, I still find myself preferring using apps written with the toolkit that matches the desktop in both cases.
Very (very) longtime user, with just under 10K albums I can peruse. Took me a while to tweak everything in the UI to my tastes, but now I can't imagine using anything else to listen to streaming music.
And yes, I really do have that many albums. Most of them are LP's and CD's, the rest are from places like Bandcamp (https://bandcamp.com/jerhewet).
But there's something refreshing about seeing a tool that just gets more useful over time. Contrast that with closed-source software, whose features are driven by OKRs and might vanish if a new PM decides they aren't promotion-worthy or important to the next billion users.
I do wonder about hygiene and vision on such projects. On the one hand, seeing what happens when dozens of people over the decades have all written players for their own weird pet format is cool. On the other, I imagine a lot of that falls out of maintenance if the guy who wrote one looses interest, or if the project gets ported to a platform he doesn't care about.
I also expect that the Linuxisms of "everything is a setting" and "control density over visual appeal" are natural consequences if nobody is in charge of setting a vision.
a) The search could be a bit more fuzzy (search "ade" and you won't find "adé")
b) importing a directory takes ages; what takes me 5-7 minutes is done by Quod Libet in <10 seconds.
Otherwise, love it!
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.
Might be useful for someone else though!
I still have Spotify but I mostly use Plexamp now and have pretty much phased out musikcube. I still have a musikcubed service container pushing a large playlist on repeat/shuffle to a FM transmitter though.
Also, last update was in December, not in 2023.
With individual files I can at least (in console for example) `cycle-values keep-open always`, which makes mpv not continue to the next file after finishing the current file, however, it doesn't work when a chapter of a .cue file has finished, thus continuing on.
I mean, even yt gets that right in the browser. Why can't dedicated clients?
I also used to have mp3s but not anymore, with Spotify, SoundCloud, BandCamp or YouTube with UBO.
For example, browsing 'by album' just adds unsightly [+] icons that are hard to hit with fat fingers on a touch screen. There should be a carousel of album art that you can swipe left or right! If there's no album art, just show a grey card and the first 10 letters of the artist's name in 8pt white letters. Once you select an album, you see the tracks on that album sorted by length, because radio edits are short and obviously the most popular tracks, so they should be on top. If you click shuffle, it will shuffle all of the tracks of the current artist (since we showed the artist's name, well the first 10 letters, so you should be a fan of all of their work). But you can also add tracks to a playlist (that's not shown), by long-pressing them. And to remove them, double tap. Everyone will try those gestures at some point in time, so it's easy to discover. Besides, they will both make a sound. Don't worry about it not being loud enough, the UI sounds will play at volume 10, and they will pause the track being played, so you don't miss anything. Playback controls are easy, just one button to play/pause/rewind (double tap)/fast forward (triple tap). And long press (10% longer than short press) to reset the playback position. Wait, we also need a control to record audio to reclaim the space being used by the mp3 currently playing, like dubbing over a tape, extra-long press will do that. Maybe that's hard to remember, so quadruple tap will also do. There should be incessant popups to remember to use the replaygain functionality, without explaining what it does (store the replaygain figures on a Google sheet, but not use them for playback yet, because the volume control uses the pinch zoom-in and pinch zoom-out gestures and we're unsure which gesture to use to enable/disable using replaygain)