I tried out most (if not all) of the music players on flathub, but I always end up going back to Rhythmbox. It’s so simple, lightweight, got just enough features (for my use case) and blends well with GTK Desktops (I mostly use Gnome and Cinnamon) and it looks so clean in my Nord theme 😆
How has your experience with Rhythmbox? do y’all got any alternative you think everybody should give a try? I personally think Elisa is a close second!
I like cmus best. It is both as simple and as complicated as I need it to be.
mpd for me
Rhythmbox has been my main music app for over 15 years now. Every now and then I’ll check out other options but I always end up back after a couple days.
I do wish they would give the UI some attention. Nothing major, just a few visual tweaks to bring it inline with modern Gnome (the alternative toolbar plugin is really close)
My only complaint with Rhythmbox is that it lets you close it while playing a song and then the ui is gone but the song keeps playing. Insanity!
actually, it’s the contrary for me! 😆 I’m currently trying to find a way to make Rhythmbox behave just like that: keep playing even when the UI is closed
No idea why you want that, but still… does this help any?
https://askubuntu.com/questions/17134/rhythmbox-still-plays-songs-after-exit
This sounds like macOS (in a good way).
I prefer Quod Libet but I have fond memories of rhythmbox.
I’ve been a Linux user since 2005ish and a DJ since at least 2013. I’ve tried a lot of music players including Rythmbox. I settled on Clementine/Strawberry or Amorok, depending on use case. Haven’t used either of them recently.
With that said, there is no right answer. Find one you like!
Side question that may be relevant since this is for local collections. Does anyone have a recommended tool for ripping and tagging audio CDs (e.g. with musicbrainz support)?
whipper is my goto for that.
Fre:ac seems to run in a wine package.
VLC? Been a long time since I’ve ripped a CD. Looks like most tools are no longer maintained.
I use k3b for ripping and kid3 for editing metadata
K3B I think.??
Last time I had a PC with an optical drive, I used the built-in features of Dolphin, and using a different software for metadata. If you use KDE, it’s hard to find a good reason to do otherwise. It will usually get metadata from CDDB, but on the other hand for metadata It’s really hard to beat Picard or Beets.
Beets will also scrape the lyrics and add them to the metadata, beside acousticbrainz goodness, multiple genres from Last.fm, and more. Picard will do most of this as well.
Cantata.
Same here. Nothing even comes close, at least in my opinion - it’s comparable to foobar2000.
@WeAreAllOne @merci3 That’s my current player of choice on KDE. Sadly it’s no longer maintained. Hopefully some fork will succeed
For a second, I misread this and thought Rockbox had a desktop port.
Never heard of it, but looks like a cool project!
Been liking Amberol lately, but it’s extremely simple. Nice UI though.
I enjoyed it at first, but it was too simple for my personal use. What it lacked the most for me was a playlist management, I didn’t find any option for that feature
Absolutely classic music player. The iTunes 1.0 UI pattern, which was pre-enshittification. To my eyes, I still don’t think I’ve ever seen a more overall efficient and descriptive way of browsing a local music library.
Awww… iTunes is that bad now? Man…last time I used iTunes was probably 2010 or so. Bummer.
TIL rhythmbox still exists.
Command line mplayer has been plenty for me.
Fooyin is also a solid choice.
the UI kinda looks like a QT based Rhythmbox. I’ll give it a try later 😀
It is heavily inspired by foobar2000, one of the GOAT under windows IMHO.
I just looked up the initial release, it was in August 2001. I don’t remember the first time I used it, but it was probably 20 years ago. Still remains my favourite for the reasons you mentioned.
