not_IOThe state of Linux music players in 2026
TheTechnician27I like being exposed to new applications, but Elisa should’ve come up in the author’s search as
kdePackages.elisa. Especially if you’re using KDE (where the Qt UI blends in well), it plainly meets all four of the criteria for inclusion. It’s such a major oversight given its popularity.
MagnificentSteinerThat screenshot of Strawberry in the blog post really makes it look bad.
Here’s a better one
macnielAs all my music is stored on my jellyfin, and since I like the GNOME-isms, I can’t recommend Gelly enough.
snoonsI’ve been using Audacious for years now; it’s lightweight and also has no library management but I find I don’t really need that. I just point it to any one album on my drive and it plays it.
I have each album saved as a separate ‘playlist’ which works well for me. I can see people being annoyed with how I have it set up, but I like it this way.
Skullgridit’s lightweight and also has no library management
That’s the point for me for Audacious. I don’t want to dig through my entire 30+ GB music folder, create a massive index or whatever, load all that shit to memory every time I open the fucking program, just to play one album.
“Oh I want this album”> Drag it in
“Oh I want this discography” > drag it in
The only problem is no multi column tab view, and no drag into empty space/designated zone to create a new playlist.
This was posted here, and criticized, two months ago:
MinnesotaGoddamhas it been updated since? i always enjoy talking music players
djdarrenHeh, clicked on that and saw my post at the top. That threw me for a second.
As an update, I’ve since worked out how to get Navidrome working over Tailscale and an Nginx redirect from my VPS, so I now have Feishin installed on several computers, all drawing from the same Navidrome server at home.
It’s pretty cool.
Command line mplayer seems fine to me. I have it aliased to “m” for convenience. Playlists work great (just make a shell script to play the songs you want). Need help getting to sleep? Shell script that sets the volume to barely audible, then plays some long instrumental audios. And so on.
i just want one i can use to sync to my phone, keep my playlists updated, and listen to music. syncing to my phone wirelessly is a big plus, but i am old enough to have two boxes of cables.
bootleg
boredsquirrel (he)But then you need a player on each platform, that works with m3u files
Which is very few, and buggy.
I use “Anrimians Simple Music Player” and Gapless/G4music, but songs are randomly disappearing from playlists. Also you need to usw default directories for the files.
SinTan1729I’d recommend using something like Navidrome instead of manually syncing the files.
This doesn’t seem exhaustive enough to be titled “the state of Linux music players.”
Interesting! Gapless is the only modern one and it is fine-ish
probably due to the criteria listed in the post.
swab148
artyom
mlg
Lemmchenquodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Tauon looks cool, though
rmpc is great. But TUI, so not for everyone, I know.
vlc has a command line mode, cvlc. It’s not great TUI program but works.
enbiousenvyI’m still on Rhythmbox but at this point it’s a hassle to use something else because the metadata (album name, track id, etc) would break. I used to test Amberol, Lollypop, GNOME music 3 years ago and the metadata requires fixing.
I also kind of care with the vanity number like play counts that is already recorded.
RedSnt 🧩♂️👓🖥️I'm glad Fooyin got an honorary mention, because that's all I need:
Update: After reading through many comments, a lot of people mentioned their affinity for foobar2000-style players, and fooyin came up as the most frequent suggestion. I haven’t tested it, but it seems to be very popular. If you want even more options, fooyin comes highly recommended by a lot of people.
robyn
CommunistI have been using JRiver Media Center for over 20 years, started on Windows and they have a perfect Linux and Mac versions. More options and features than I would ever use. It just works, best player I have ever used.
jriver.com
glibgThis looks interesting, I will give it a try one of these days.
My gold standard for audio players is MusicBee because I LOVE the album art view, where if you click on an album it “folds open” the songs without taking you away from the album art view. I couldn’t find a Linux player with a comparable feature, and I tried a bunch of them. I wish I wasn’t so particular about my music player but it seems everyone is, hence the many different software.
recklessengagementSaving this thread for later. Hoping to find something with a wide variety of visualizers
I’ve been using Elisa music player, a kde app, for a while now. It’s relatively simple to use, required no setup and the user experience is pleasant.
I use it to manage my library of a couple thousand songs in lossless formats (about 100GB worth) with no performance issues.
I get music from ripping old CDs or from Qobuz, that lets you download DRM free music after purchasing and album or a subscription
VLC is where it’s at.
I use supersonic with jellyfin.
Mpd+ncmpcpp for almost 15 years here. Album art would be nice but I don’t look at my music player long enough to care that much. Its always thrown on a far away workspace.
Yes I tried Kew and Rmpc. Hell I cloned Rmpc and rewrote it from scratch to try and learn Rust. They’re both neat projects but not enough for me to switch. Especially Kew. That one requires some reprogramming of the brain. I’m good right now.
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