I’m hoping someone has a recommendation for an audio player, something I’ve somehow missed. Perhaps something up an coming that’s not got a lot of hype yet to make it easy to find. However this is going to be tricky so bare with me.
I have spent years searching for, building, installing, testing something that stands up to foobar2000. As soon as I mention foobar2000 someone inevitably pipes up with deaDBeef/Quod Libet…No. Foobar2000 under wine is also not an option. I’ve been trying to get it to run since the early 2000’s. It’s never stable and not even close to anything I’d trust my cranked up speakers with. If you’re lucky it crashes leaving you in silence…otherwise you get the nasty 3ms buffer screech.
Recently retried Tauon and it should be almost everything I want but man virtually every surface has a glaring bug or breakage. I used Audacious for years but some idiotic input behavior in the media library had me fed up. (Pressing enter in search wipes your current playlist with no undo and replaces it with whatever the current query is. No user config for keybinds to change or disable this stupidity.) QmmP was / is kinda the main stay but like Audacious it ticks most the boxes but lacks the database stuff for plays/favoriting and playlist queries. Both Audacius and QmmP also suck for game files. At present I use deaDBeef exclusively for game file playing. It’s way to crashy though. “We had a crash. Will not resume the saved session to avoid a crash cycle.” -DeaDBeef in a nutshell. MusikCube used to be posed to be the player but then he scraped most of it and now it’s a console player and still suffers in a lot of areas like tags & file types. There was a lot of hype about VLC 4 so I gave the nightly git a build…excuse me sir, your dumpster is on fire…
You may notice when you get to the feature list below, nowhere will you see Steaming (cough Streaming) crap, album art or any other of what seems to be every Flipping players focus these days. Who the F___ needs album art. Are you just staring at your player the whole time? Go watch MTV you nutter. The days of coming home and opening up the album art while you listen are long gone, play the damned song and leave me alone! (shakes cane) I’m sure there is some feature I’m forgetting or behavior that is make or break but like I said, tricky.
Now this is off the top of my head but I will try to list what I’ve already been through.
- deaDBeef (It lacks what I want but it works…so long as you don’t breath or make any sudden movements. Then it crashes…it always crashes…)
- MusikCube (Issues with filetypes and tags. I’m not really fond of cli players.)
- Quod Libet (A UI vomit fest that somehow has lots of what I want but negates it all with the fact it won’t play anything!)
- Babe / Vvave
- Dopamine (Nothing better than basic old players, unintuitive UI, doesn’t seem to find music/metadata)
- Audacious (Basic, works, some horrific UI and playlist issues.)
- Rhythmbox (Old, GTK, clunky and somehow sidesteps everything I want while trying to do everything I don’t.)
- Strawberry / Clemintine / Amarok / Exaile / Banshee (A thousand ports of the same bloated slow pile of UI crap.)
- Songbird / Tomahawk (These sucked even when they were cool.)
- XMMP / QmmP (X, old, discontinued) (Q new, works OK, lacks some key features I pine for like the DB/Rating stuff.)
- JuK (Bah more KDE kitchen sink that forces everything you don’t want to get a few things you do while making the whole experience feel uncomfortable…)
- CMus (Bah, I mean I like it for a cli player but just feels clunk and still misses the marks.)
- Sayonara (The 1990’s called and said you’re feature incomplete.)
- Harmonoid (Slick “nothingness”)
- Tauon (Baby you’d be a perfect 10 if it wasn’t for that crack/meth habit.)
- Museeks (I just retested this, don’t remember a thing about it other than lacking…)
- MPD (Convoluted, needs addon deamons and just too many issues with clients. Yes sir, we need 50 Servers to 1 Client…that’s the golden, I mean brown ratio Sir.)
- VLC 4 (Sir, your dumpster is on fire…I mean you are trying to copy Windows 11 poorly…I mean FIRE!)
I will also say some of the listed could be considered not fairly tested. Some just never work/launch, never build. Others are close but not -all there-. Some are just what I’m after but broken as a politicians morals. Some promise the sun, moon and stars then deliver brain damaged Fabio.
So some of the key things I am looking for:
-
Customizable UI like old Firefox UI where you can move anything anywhere and hide what you want hidden [read: No jumbo buttons, wasted space]
-
Playlist functions:
– Basic crap like remove duplicates / import / export
– Advanced crap like db query style creation stuff. Play all tracks with a rating over 4, play favorite tracks, play newest etc. -
Library Search
-
Auto “find/add” new files when they are added to the library folder
-
Tag Editing: Ability to open a selected track(s) with an external or internal tag editor.
-
UI for favorite/plays/codec
-
Repeat Functions:
– Seamless/Gapless repeat/loop -
Global Hotkey stuff / Cli args for play-pause/next/previous
Bonus | Wiggle Room Features:
-
Game Console Music support (nsf|hes|vgm|vgz)
-
QT Based (not GTK3+ based or KDE dependant)
-
Not based on flaky “attack vector” paradise stacks (electron,npm/node.js)
*Comic relief
Again I’ve been doing this a long time. I wrote this and thought hell it’s been at least a few years since I tried Quod Libet, maybe I should revisit it, maybe it’s better? Installed…go to play a song…“Bla bla I don’t have the backend to play this format.” Meanwhile under the supported file types, said file type is listed. Crap UI, never works no matter how many GStreamer backends I install… Oh sorry this file is a special snow flake I need GStreamer-thebadthegoodtheugly-andtheirmothers.v232728378457283782748737232 Oh that’s not in any repo…that’s because you have to climb Everest, spin counter clockwise three times and fart on a near by Yak to get that version…Oh and once installed I still won’t play the song.
)
)