Although I don't use DeaDBeeF as my primary music player anymore, back when I did, I wrote a plugin for using VgmStream with DeaDBeeF around 10 years ago, so I could more easily listen to video game soundtracks directly from the game files. For whatever reason, I have continued to maintain said plugin despite that I only use DeaDBeeF to test updates to it.
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.
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.
Surprised media monkey never makes this list. I started using it initially because it worked work with my ipod but I still use it because if the visual UI. Cons are that it only works on Windows and there's a paid version. I've been investigating players over the past year and I've installed most of these but I'm always disappointed in how lacking they are in terms of just giving me a visually pleasing dark mode grid of album covers. It's nitpicky but it's something I absolutely want as a way to browse all my music.
I'm rather fond of QMMP, because being built with normal Qt5 and a very vanilla stock theme, it integrates nicely into my "You're going to look like Motif come hell or high water" desktop theming philosophy.
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.
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.
Can vouch for Audacious, clean straight-forward UI and neat plugin functionality if needed (along with equaliser functionality which is what originally got me on board). Bit of a heavy feel from QT backend though so I might try out DeaDBeeF..!
It feels like music players are becoming a thing for old geezers, like everything that requires you to have your data on a local disk. The 'modern' approach is just streaming everything off the net, no local storage required.
(I'm writing this as a disapproving old geezer, just in case it wasn't clear.)
I must be an even older geezer, as I detest all the late wave music players that became full screen things that load music from everywhere.
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.
You don't need to always listen to new pieces of music to enjoy music. Once you realize that you can focus on owning the stuff you like and listen to that most of the time
There's a large and growing number of music players for streaming from your own server. You get the best of both worlds by owning your music and having it accessible anywhere.
I've been using strawberry since moving to linux since there was no good foobar2000 replacement but I just discovered fooyin these past couple of days and this is so convincingly close that I can pretend it's just foobar2000.
That's not to throw any shade on strawberry, it's also incredibly good, but foobar2000 will always have it's claws in me.
DeaDBeeF has been my goto for a while now because it's the only linux music player with the extremely specific feature I used in winamp:
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.
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.
> runs on GNU/Linux distributions, macOS, Windows, *BSD, OpenSolaris, and other UNIX-like systems.
> 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.
> If the author is here, please understand that there is no "native" UI toolkit for Linux or BSD.
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.
Consider that for many GTK is also native. Mate/Gnome has been a standard for many years. Personally I'm getting more problems with Qt apps than GTK. Especially: font rendering, once a year or so Qt apps revert to outline fonts (I use bitmap OTB fonts as desktop font - i like pixel perfect quality in small sizes) or worse stop rendering font at all and I get empy menus.
Second thing is IME support this also breaks very often on updates.
Why Qt neglects such basic things I don't know, but because of the above I cannot call Qt 'excellent'
DeaDBeeF already has both GTK and Qt UI plugin options, so just use the one that’s most native to your desktop (GTK: GNOME/MATE/XFCE/Cinnamon, Qt: KDE/Trinity/LXQt). If those UIs aren’t sufficient for some reason, since they’re plugins they can be forked and tweaked or if one was so inclined, they could write a whole new UI plugin. No need to wait on the author.
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).
The thing that’s missing for me is discovery. Release Radar and the Discovery playlist and related artists on Spotify (for me) are currently top tier. I get introductions to artists no one else has with songs I often like. Last.fm used to do this? Maybe? But doesn’t seem like it anymore. Other streaming services, apple, tidal, quobuz, youtube, all seem lacking in one aspect or alter. Are there options on this?
I don't subscribe to the FOSS purism you often see in Linux projects.
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.
I know DeaDBeeF's lead dev (O. Yakovenko) from a game dev forum I frequented ~20 years ago. IIRC I regarded him as one of most competent people on said forum: he was an actual professional game dev, perhaps capable implementing a whole game from scratch, whereas most ppl on the forum were amateurs.
DeaDBeef isn’t my primary player, but it does have some interesting capabilities that I use it for from time to time such as the ability to list chaptered AAC files as separate tracks (making it easier to navigate them).
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.
DB is quite nice. Don't know if it still supports it but back in 2017-2019 it was possible to use terminal commands to control playback, similar to what one might use a more complex tool like mpd for, which I wrapped in Picolisp to be able to easily change the music without leaving the REPL and then hooked it up to a socket for remote control over the LAN.
Most of Linux based media players, including deadbeef, can be interacted with using MPRIS, a DBus interface, and there are multiple CLIs for sending/extracting information from them. I can recommend you the one I developed: https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-ctl , but there are others.
At this point syncing playlists across devices is my main requirement for a music library player.
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.
I mostly use a simple music player made by a friend for my daily needs. The design is inspired from spotify and It works really great. https://github.com/H0lyDiv3r/player
[+] [-] jchw|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] renegat0x0|1 year ago|reply
- https://foobar2000.org
- https://volumio.org
- http://rhythmbox.org
- https://amarok.kde.org
- https://cmus.github.io
- https://museeks.io
- https://fooyin.org
- https://audacious-media-player.org
- https://www.clementine-player.org
[+] [-] scns|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] webnrrd2k|1 year ago|reply
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.
[0] https://www.mpg123.de/
[+] [-] nataliste|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] timonofathens|1 year ago|reply
I just don't like the cover art manager, everything else is jut right for me.
[+] [-] gpspake|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] spacebear|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cageface|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hakfoo|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tripflag|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] esafak|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dingdingdang|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] raffraffraff|1 year ago|reply
getmusicbee.com
[+] [-] amai|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fph|1 year ago|reply
(I'm writing this as a disapproving old geezer, just in case it wasn't clear.)
[+] [-] silisili|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ekianjo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] edgarvaldes|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] RealStickman_|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yapyap|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cullumsmith|1 year ago|reply
https://www.fooyin.org/
[+] [-] worble|1 year ago|reply
That's not to throw any shade on strawberry, it's also incredibly good, but foobar2000 will always have it's claws in me.
[+] [-] lousken|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] TiredOfLife|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hnuser435|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mikae1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Avshalom|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scblock|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] foresto|1 year ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] idoubtit|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Heikete|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cosmic_cheese|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jerhewet|1 year ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] z3n0n|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] conception|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bsimpson|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] killerstorm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mrbluecoat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] riidom|1 year ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] cosmic_cheese|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] josefritzishere|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mariusor|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jay_kyburz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cess11|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mariusor|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] internet101010|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jossephus01|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] a-french-anon|1 year ago|reply