6 ms·

Some people I know love it but it just doesn't work for me in the way I use a music player. It's similar to foobar2000 in some ways which depending on your pref

Some people I know love it but it just doesn't work for me in the way I use a music player. It's similar to foobar2000 in some ways which depending on your preferences can be good or bad. 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.

flyinghamster 2y ago
I really miss Foobar2000 on Linux (I've tried it a few times with Wine, and was never impressed vs. running it natively on Windows), so this looks like it might be just up my alley - especially since it has custom tag support.
- throwawee 2y ago
  > (I've tried it a few times with Wine, and was never impressed vs. running it natively on Windows) 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.
  - flyinghamster 2y ago
    Last time I tried it (quite long ago), I recall having some audio issues. Maybe I should try again... that was back when my old audio interface (that only ever worked on XP, since they never released production-grade drivers for Win7) finally died.
    - Ennea 2y ago
      Give it another try. I switched to Linux in 2022 and have been using fb2k via Wine all this time, and it runs perfectly.
- dsp_person 2y ago
  Still using wine+foobar2000 as my music player here. The only issue I can think of is sometimes when when turning my screens off and back on, the UI might be glitched and need a restart.
liotier 2y ago
> Strawberry is better for me but still kind of janky 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.
- Lammy 2y ago
  Which itself carried the torch of Amarok 1.x's UX. No software rewrite, not even GNOME2→GNOME3, ever hurt me as much as Amarok 1.4 → 2.0 Compare Amarok 1.4: https://amarok.kde.org/files/amarok14/shot7.png https://amarok.kde.org/files/amarok14/shot7.png To Amarok 2.0 alpha 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110820190636/http://blog.lydiapintscher.de/wp-content/amarokalpha1.jpg 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.org/wiki/FAQ#Amarok_2.0_FAQ 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‽‽
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Ouch. I loved Amarok 1.x back in the day. That was... something.
  - liotier 2y ago
    Right - how could I forget Amarok ? And I too was pushed to Clementine by Amarok 2.0
lelandfe 2y ago
> How in 2025 music players refuse to (not can't, refuse to) get "Album Artist" right blows my mind 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.
reverendsteveii 2y ago
>And the name is terrible. The name is just a piece of hacker lore from back in the day https://catb.org/jargon/html/D/DEADBEEF.html https://catb.org/jargon/html/D/DEADBEEF.html
- scblock 2y ago
  I know what it is, that doesn't make it good.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    It's amazing how bad software developers are at naming their projects. At least this one is unique enough to be searchable, and could probably be SEO'ed above the computer lore (indeed, at least for me it's already #1 for "deadbeef" on the Google SERP). 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??
    - thesnide 2y ago
      Isn't it obvious ? Lightweight URL parsing library in Rust is just Bananas! 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.
    - leviathant 2y ago
      "Why hasn't Gimp found mainstream success?" "Adoption of our Ogg Vorbis format isn't where we hoped it to be" "Fork me on Git"
      - GuB-42 2y ago
        Git is just a hobby project named after the author, like Linux. Yes, really: https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitFaq.html#Why_the_.27Git.27_name.3F https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/git.wiki.kernel.org/index... https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html
cosmic_cheese 2y ago
Music players are a great example of a type of app that at first brush seems simple and difficult to do badly, but in reality is littered with subtleties and bits that hinge on the preferences of the user, all of which can make or break the app. Makes it easy to understand why there’s more players than can be counted but few worth using.
- wang_li 2y ago
  That's because they all try to be more than they should be. I don't need or want a visualization option. I don't need or want an equalizer. I don't need or want a library. Those functions properly belong in other places or in the waste bin. My music library is on my filesystem and is sorted and arranged as I prefer. When I want to play an album I drag it over to MPC-HC. When I want to create a custom playlist, I open the playlist and drag songs over in the order I want. I don't need a psychedelic visualization, my use case for playing music on my pc is as background audio. The function of an equalizer is to make up for shortcomings in my speakers and belongs there. The media player should convert an encoded file into PCM data to be shoved out the DAC. Leave the file managing to my file manager. The sound shaping to my speakers. And the crap frequency domain visualizations in the trash.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - FpUser 2y ago
    Perfect. The only thing left is to convince every other user to share your opinions. </s>
  - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
    I’ve of two minds on this. On one hand I agree, because the more functionality a music player has the more likely some of it will miss the mark, but on the other hand I find file managers as they currently exist are somewhat inadequate and incapable of fully replacing a library management system in a music player. 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.
fleshgolem 2y ago
I have tried A LOT of different music players over the years on Linux and the amount of ones that do not offer a single easy way to find a given album by a given artist is truly maddening. 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...
ruuda 2y ago
Quod Libet handles album artists properly with the right sorting options? (And also it's one of the few that supports original release date, another seemingly essential feature that few players support.) In Musium (https://docs.ruuda.nl/musium/ https://docs.ruuda.nl/musium/) I also handle collaboration albums that have multiple album artists, based on Musicbrainz album artist id.
- scblock 2y ago
  If they changed something in the last year, maybe. But last time I dug into this in detail they screwed it up out of the box, specifically by refusing to use the same mp3 ID3 tag that most other software including Picard uses. So for FLACs it worked, but for MP3s it did not, until I went in and edited the code. 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.
Novosell 2y ago
What your exact issues with quod libet? As someone who's main criteria were (1) replaygain support (2) good album artist sort and (3) simple interface, quod libet is where I landed. What are the own goals you speak of?
aidenn0 2y ago
> How in 2025 music players refuse to (not can't, refuse to) get "Album Artist" right blows my mind. 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.

flyinghamster 2y ago

I really miss Foobar2000 on Linux (I've tried it a few times with Wine, and was never impressed vs. running it natively on Windows), so this looks like it might be just up my alley - especially since it has custom tag support.

throwawee 2y ago
> (I've tried it a few times with Wine, and was never impressed vs. running it natively on Windows) 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.
- flyinghamster 2y ago
  Last time I tried it (quite long ago), I recall having some audio issues. Maybe I should try again... that was back when my old audio interface (that only ever worked on XP, since they never released production-grade drivers for Win7) finally died.
  - Ennea 2y ago
    Give it another try. I switched to Linux in 2022 and have been using fb2k via Wine all this time, and it runs perfectly.
dsp_person 2y ago
Still using wine+foobar2000 as my music player here. The only issue I can think of is sometimes when when turning my screens off and back on, the UI might be glitched and need a restart.

liotier 2y ago

> Strawberry is better for me but still kind of janky 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.

Lammy 2y ago
Which itself carried the torch of Amarok 1.x's UX. No software rewrite, not even GNOME2→GNOME3, ever hurt me as much as Amarok 1.4 → 2.0 Compare Amarok 1.4: https://amarok.kde.org/files/amarok14/shot7.png https://amarok.kde.org/files/amarok14/shot7.png To Amarok 2.0 alpha 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110820190636/http://blog.lydiapintscher.de/wp-content/amarokalpha1.jpg 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.org/wiki/FAQ#Amarok_2.0_FAQ 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‽‽
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Ouch. I loved Amarok 1.x back in the day. That was... something.
- liotier 2y ago
  Right - how could I forget Amarok ? And I too was pushed to Clementine by Amarok 2.0

lelandfe 2y ago

> How in 2025 music players refuse to (not can't, refuse to) get "Album Artist" right blows my mind 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.

reverendsteveii 2y ago

>And the name is terrible. The name is just a piece of hacker lore from back in the day https://catb.org/jargon/html/D/DEADBEEF.html https://catb.org/jargon/html/D/DEADBEEF.html

scblock 2y ago
I know what it is, that doesn't make it good.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  It's amazing how bad software developers are at naming their projects. At least this one is unique enough to be searchable, and could probably be SEO'ed above the computer lore (indeed, at least for me it's already #1 for "deadbeef" on the Google SERP). 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??
  - thesnide 2y ago
    Isn't it obvious ? Lightweight URL parsing library in Rust is just Bananas! 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.
  - leviathant 2y ago
    "Why hasn't Gimp found mainstream success?" "Adoption of our Ogg Vorbis format isn't where we hoped it to be" "Fork me on Git"
    - GuB-42 2y ago
      Git is just a hobby project named after the author, like Linux. Yes, really: https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitFaq.html#Why_the_.27Git.27_name.3F https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/git.wiki.kernel.org/index... https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html

cosmic_cheese 2y ago

Music players are a great example of a type of app that at first brush seems simple and difficult to do badly, but in reality is littered with subtleties and bits that hinge on the preferences of the user, all of which can make or break the app. Makes it easy to understand why there’s more players than can be counted but few worth using.

wang_li 2y ago
That's because they all try to be more than they should be. I don't need or want a visualization option. I don't need or want an equalizer. I don't need or want a library. Those functions properly belong in other places or in the waste bin. My music library is on my filesystem and is sorted and arranged as I prefer. When I want to play an album I drag it over to MPC-HC. When I want to create a custom playlist, I open the playlist and drag songs over in the order I want. I don't need a psychedelic visualization, my use case for playing music on my pc is as background audio. The function of an equalizer is to make up for shortcomings in my speakers and belongs there. The media player should convert an encoded file into PCM data to be shoved out the DAC. Leave the file managing to my file manager. The sound shaping to my speakers. And the crap frequency domain visualizations in the trash.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- FpUser 2y ago
  Perfect. The only thing left is to convince every other user to share your opinions. </s>
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  I’ve of two minds on this. On one hand I agree, because the more functionality a music player has the more likely some of it will miss the mark, but on the other hand I find file managers as they currently exist are somewhat inadequate and incapable of fully replacing a library management system in a music player. 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.

fleshgolem 2y ago

I have tried A LOT of different music players over the years on Linux and the amount of ones that do not offer a single easy way to find a given album by a given artist is truly maddening. 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...

ruuda 2y ago

Quod Libet handles album artists properly with the right sorting options? (And also it's one of the few that supports original release date, another seemingly essential feature that few players support.) In Musium (https://docs.ruuda.nl/musium/ https://docs.ruuda.nl/musium/) I also handle collaboration albums that have multiple album artists, based on Musicbrainz album artist id.

scblock 2y ago
If they changed something in the last year, maybe. But last time I dug into this in detail they screwed it up out of the box, specifically by refusing to use the same mp3 ID3 tag that most other software including Picard uses. So for FLACs it worked, but for MP3s it did not, until I went in and edited the code. 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.

Novosell 2y ago

What your exact issues with quod libet? As someone who's main criteria were (1) replaygain support (2) good album artist sort and (3) simple interface, quod libet is where I landed. What are the own goals you speak of?

aidenn0 2y ago

> How in 2025 music players refuse to (not can't, refuse to) get "Album Artist" right blows my mind. 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.