WAIT!
before you start commenting that TUI musicplayer xy is the best, my priorities:
must have:
- support for m3u playlists (synced to Android with Syncthingy) should autodetect them in a single folder I use also for the music files, and read/write them
- support for viewing all files
- support for custom music directories
- support for deleting music files
- Flatpak OR clutterfree on KDE
would like:
- Pipewire output
- nice simple GUI
- modern, clutterfree design OR customizability
- subtitles, cover images, etc.
I used G4Music which looks awesome and has minimal playlist support. It works really well but it cant write to the playlist. It is blazingly fast, and I made an issue, offering a bounty for write-to-playlist support.
I found Lollypop, the old GTK UI is way better than the Qt alternatives, while still kinda ugly. But it seems to tick all boxes, apart from Pipewire support.
What I tried:
G4Music
- UI perfect
- no file deletion
- no playlist addition
- no playlist creation
Lollypop
- UI is bareable
- pulseaudio, no setting at all
- playlist support including writing to! You need to enable it
- lots of internet stuff for artwork and subtitles
- sane defaults
GNOME music
- does not detect my .m3u playlists
- slow
- needs pulseaudio
- settings are a joke
- no folder view
Strawberry
- UI is horrible and not customizable enough
- no Pipewire support
- no .m3u detection
- cluttered, no UI zoom possible
- system icon theme is not applied
Clementine
- like strawberry but different?
- more online stuff
- interface less customizable
- cursor broken on the Flatpak
Amarok
- Strawberry in even older?
- bloat?
- retro-development status
MusicPod
- UI hides too much stuff
- no playlist support
- no filesystem hierarchy support
- strange Ubuntu look, but good UI, fancy background
- no podcast backup file support (so Kasts is better for that)
- but pipewire support!
Plattenalbum
- no playlist support
- otherwise looks great
Resonance
- modern, GTK4 Libadwaita, UI is damn lit
- freezes, fills up the entire RAM (scans every title at once!) -> not optimized at all, made system freeze and needed to hard shutdown.
- no playlist support?
- no pipewire support?
Melody
- uses soon EOL GNOME 42 runtime
Amberol
- beautiful but too minimalist
- why are there soo many GNOME music players??
moosync
- very nice UI
- electron: tiny cursor on Wayland, no Pipewire support
- plugin support for Youtube, Spotify (using librespot) and LastFM
- local playlists seem broken
If your system is using pipewire, any audio player will also use it.
Strawberry is the best youre gonna get. For KDE, Elisa is also an option ive used in the past. Prettier but simpler.
No it will use ALSA, Jack or often Pulseaudio. Pipewire can plug into these, but this causes overhead and to my knowledge doesnt allow things like external Equalization.
I may have to give Elisa another try. I think Strawberry (and Clementine) and Elisa suck. They are completely unintuitive, the UI has too many buttons and options for random stuff, and basic things you expect dont work.
I’m pretty sure Fooyin meets all these. It’s still very early in development but I like it more than any of the other native Linux music players I’ve tried.
Deadbeef might be worth a look, though you might need a plugin for folder view
I’ve been down this rabbit hole as well. They all have problems but I’m most happy with Cantata for library playing (beets for file/tag management) and deadbeef for odd local files and file conversation.
I dunno if VLC can do “Pipewire output”, but I think it does a lot of the other stuff you mentioned. I use it on my desktop (Mint) and my phone (Android) and it suits my needs at least.
Hm, VLC is an unofficial (but very well done) Flatpak, no Wayland support and a bit bloated and not well suited for playing music afaik. But I may have to give it another try.
The new 4.0 version of VLC looks very cool, but it is only available from an Ubuntu PPA which I used with a Ubuntu Distrobox, but no way that sucks too.
Should do some Github action to extract the binary from that PPA and pack it into a Flatpak.
