The state of Linux music players in 2026

I'm surprised the author didn't list KDE's Elisa: https://apps.kde.org/elisa/ Especially since they referenced KDE when they voiced their wish for Strawberry to be more modernized to match the appearance of KDE's Plasma desktop.

I haven't used it for a while (I generally don't listen to music outside of my drive to work these days), but I remember it being a pleasant replacement for MusicBee when I first switched over to a Linux distro full-time, coming from Windows. The Elisa UI is nice too imo, though it's more of a "native UI" look compared to some of the others in the list, though which style is nicer is up to personal preference.

It may also be a plus to some that it is not using Electron , and uses Qt instead (Well, apparently it uses QML, so still kind-of using ECMAScript/Javascript. But only for the user interface, and not the main business logic.)

How is Quod Libet not here? Cross platform and its plugin system should be enough reason on its own

https://github.com/quodlibet/quodlibet

The thing I don't understand is alphabetic ordering of albums, which is the default most everywhere. Albums of a particular artist should obviously be ordered by when they were released (I don't care whether from newest or from oldest).

It appears I'm an alien: almost none of the music players' authors care about this - they happily show albums from A to Z.

I use Clementine which can be set up to order albums by year. Any other options?

I'm very happy that I mostly listen to electronic music (house & techno in its various forms). The predominant way to listen to that is via DJ mixes and recorded Livesets. This field has always been ignored by the commercial streamers, and there is a culture of uploading sets to platforums such as youtube and soundcloud - where you can easily download (albeit youtube making things more difficult in recent years). Since a set is a minimum of 1hour, you don't care for song search, album art etc. You basically need 5-10 files to have music for weeks.

I'm using audacious on macOS installed via homebrew - it has a winamp-like skin. That was peak audioplayer design.

Something that wasn't mentioned in the article - if you're coming from Windows and using Foobar2000, you'll want DeadBeeF https://deadbeef.sourceforge.io/

I'm not thrilled by the music player options on Linux. I've tried many and found most of them awful. Even the author of this article notes negatives about all of the listed players, which I find unacceptable (except for Recordbox, I'll have to look at that). And these are their favorites out of 200 players!

It's the typical problem of free software: bad UI.

I use Music on macOS (disable the music store and it's fine) and have used Rhythmbox on GNOME (passable). Still looking for something good on Linux.

List from the post, with the author's own criticism:

Amberol

This barely fits my criteria for features … no library management

Euphonica

you will also need to set up MPD … The UI chokes … wish it had a song search function … changing the volume requires using my scroll wheel on the volume knob

Feishin

You will need a music server … Electron app

Lollypop

the user experience is painful

Plattenalbum

you will need to bring your own MPD … cannot even see a list of all albums

Strawberry

less intuitive than I’d like it to be … giant translucent strawberry in the middle of my screen at all times

Tauon

“everything-is-a-playlist” approach … overwhelming and confusing … stretched icons … scroll bar is on the left of the window for some reason

Worth noting that most of these GTK4/libadwaita players are going to look out of place on anything that isn't GNOME. If you're on KDE or a tiling WM, Strawberry or one of the Qt-based options will integrate much better

> [regarding spotify] At the end, I had nothing to show for it. My carefully curated “library” was not mine

Not just your library, but your listen history and your playlists. I was very annoyed that I had to pay a 3rd party company to export this data so that I could import it into listenbrainz and navidrome.

Not to mention there's a song that Spotify removed from my "Liked" playlist that to this day I can't quite remember, though I can remember just enough of it to drive me mad: https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/comments/1hklstg/tomt...

Anyway, I manage a homelab (read: a scrapbox ubuntu machine with 64TB of spinning disk attached) with 25,000 songs in it, and upon exiting my last position, spent my therapist-mandated "burnout recovery time" finally using `beet` to organize the damn thing. I still don't really understand beet, but now I have a semi-decent flow for abandoning Tidal: Find new released music on Listenbrainz, download it in Nicotine (filtering for >320). Idly browse a given user's other folders shared in Nicotine while waiting for downloads to see if they have anything else I want. Once done, `beet import /mnt/media/downloads/music2`, go through its flow, add anything to musicbrainz that isn't already in there, wipe the download directory when finished to clear out any cruft, and happily play it on Feishin on desktop (connected to my Navidrome instance).

I'm still sorting the mobile version of this out a bit. "Tempus" on F-droid seems the best Subsonic client, however unfortunately "offlining" music on it doesn't expose those files to the Android system or other apps, so I can only play those files within Tempus itself. That's not such a big deal when I've got my IEMs plugged directly into the headphone jack on my phone (yeah that's right I found a phone in 2026 with a headphone jack: sony xperia), but when I have my usb DAC plugged in, I want to use "USB Audio Player PRO" to bypass the android audio stack, and that can only play audio files it can find in local directories, no subsonic compatibility (but it does have a Tidal integration...). So lately I've tried just downloading playlists and albums from the Navidrome web interface on my phone.

Switching from winslop to linux last year (thanks Satya) I did expect some teething issues. The reality was a bit different than what I imagined: fedora kde the OS is rock solid, but the software choices are a bit lacking. Just finding a good audio player can be a pain, and eventually I settled on some foobar clone fooyin, which while lacking built-in audio conversion mostly does what I want it to.

MacOS however truly takes the cake. An OS that’s great for creative softwate, working with images, video, audio and so on, and every single music player is something designed by aliens and/or buggy and/or missing some basic features. I went through ~five different players just to find one that has a waveform seekbar, eventually finding it in quodlibet, which while somewhat functional fits in the designed by aliens part. Baffling.

Quick shoutout to Fooyin (https://github.com/fooyin/fooyin) which is a customizeable and very performant music player. Built on QtWidgets, so it's very snappy and themeable.

Not mentioned in the article, so I'd like to give a shout-out to cmus.

https://cmus.github.io/

For all my fellow terminal friends <3

> You might say that owning is more expensive than renting, even with all the price increases. Sure. But I’ve paid for Spotify for ten years, from 2014 to 2024, and that’s a solid 1200€ with the old pricing. At the end, I had nothing to show for it. My carefully curated “library” was not mine - it was held hostage by a company that can up the prices at any point.

10 years to realize it ? What took so long ?

I tend to use strawberry these days, as an amarok convert from back in the kde3 days. My "workflow" is to go fish for the stuff that I'm in the mood to listen to in the moment, using the collection tree view, dragging and dropping mostly whole albums in a (new) playlist, then fine-tuning with the queue (generally hand picking 3-5 tracks I want to start with and then placing the marker on top of a whole album or something like that).

I like the ability to build playlists with tracks from different sources, including subsonic-compatible servers (my "staging area" for new music is my local drive, and that then goes to a remote navidrome server once "curated").

Over time, I end up with a dozen "topical" playlists, and here again, strawberry is pretty good at keeping things approachable and high-level.

I also like that the grid control intro which the tracks are listed is so configurable.

I like moodbars <3

AIMP3[1] for windows is a fine Winamp style music player with many features beyond winamp, eg. Music library / excellent file format conversion. It has a platinum rating on WineHQ[2] and anecdotally works completely for me on Arch Linux with wine including plugins and (old skool)visualizations. AIMP3 also has a linux variant, but its got a much shorter feature list and is in a slow dev cycle, not ready for primetime.

[1] https://www.aimp.ru/?do=download&os=windows

[2] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

I was surprised not to find cantata[1], another MPD graphical client, on the list. Used it for the past three years, despite it being unmaintained for quite some time now. The client is very featureful, allows downloading lyrics and covers automatically (TBF had many mismatches, like downloading some Gillette ad as an Eminem's album cover). Most important to me is the ability to listen do directories and not artists/albums, which cantata does perfectly. Recently nixpkgs replaced cantata with a fork[2], so cantata is kind of online again.

[1]: https://github.com/CDrummond/cantata

[2]: https://github.com/nullobsi/cantata

Asking here because I'm lazy to do my own research:

Are there music players that allow searching by credit? E.g. albums produced by Rick Rubin, or tracks where Justin Adams plays guitar. This kind of information is usually available on Discogs or MusicBrainz.

This is a very good list, thanks for sharing it. Despite having been on a music player journey like the author, in surprised to see several on the list I've not encountered before. This just tells me that the state of music players on Linux is extremely healthy, and that makes sense, it's the only os where the concept of owning your data exists, so of course time and effort is being spent on this part too.

In the end, for me anyway, I'm only listening to music and I didn't really care too much about what the player looked like, not as much as I thought I would. Even VLC, not mentioned here, is a well functioning music player and will do the job just fine.

Great list! Not sure how I've missed all these in my search but I've had success with Plexamp (Gnome, Fedora), with Plex served from my Synology NAS. Opinions on Plex aside, it's been the most successful "native" experience across mobile/linux that just works.

Majority of GTK/Adwaita solutions are always so close but missing something critical, especially when using DLNA (e.g treated as secondary to local library, intermittent first load issues etc) That said, I got quite far with Gapless [1]

1. https://gitlab.gnome.org/neithern/g4music

Shoutouts to Audacious

https://audacious-media-player.org/

None of the current solutions work for someone like me. I have multiple versions of the same album so the UI needs to incorporate labels, catalog numbers, etc. and the playlists need to accommodate disc subtitles and grouping. The only two players that allow me this functionality are both on Windows so there's little available for the collectors such as myself.

For most of my music listening needs, I self-host SwingMusic and keep it pinned in Firefox. Occasionally I'll open the music files directly with MPV or VLC.

The automatic lyrics fetching and playback sync in SwingMusic is pretty nice. My only complaint is that it doesn't let me do full-collection shuffle. Ideally it would also allow me to do something like "full collection shuffle but only of songs that I have never heard". Sometimes I'll pick up an album because it seems interesting but things happen and I forget that I added it and it might languish without listening to it for months or years.

I'm waiting a bit for this to mature before I try it out, but I've seen that there's a few ongoing projects to analyze your full music collection to do feature extraction and generate smart playlists using AI tools. I'm not sure if it'll pan out but it seems like a fun tool for exploring large music collections and possibly making unexpected connections.

Maybe it's just me, but I still like the plainness of MPD + ncmpcpp.

Music Assistant (https://github.com/music-assistant) is really onto something good, and it looks like they are working towards native clients. Multi room, streaming, lyrics, DSP, catalogue of local media.

Surprised there's no mention of the tried-and-true VLC.

There is a lot of choices in that area, but for me every time there was something I was unhappy with. So in the end I just wrote my own. It works exactly like I want, and it was a fun project to do anyway.

Next stuff I want to add in it, is the automatic translation of lyrics (maybe with the deepl api).

JRiver is an advanced media player that works cross platform including Linux. It isn’t the prettiest thing around and understanding everything that it can do can be frustrating but it will do just about anything you’d like a media player to do.

I rarely interact with it directly. I usually use JRemote on my iPad or iPhone to control it. There is also an incredibly fast web front end you can use in whatever device you want.

Does the old Logitech music server (or whatever it is called these days) work on Linux? There have been a bunch of front end programs to use those servers.

I went the other way. I just want to shuffle all my songs or a playlist (m3u) without any of the other crap. Add and remove favourites. Album-focused players are a non-starter. Players without a simple global search box are a non starter.

Ended up 80% vibe coding one in Qt (PySide6) in a couple of evenings that does everything I want, exactly how I want. Added lyric fetching via LIBLRC (saved to .lrc files - no proprietary databases) and register as a music player with DBUS so it can be controlled. Working really well.

It's 2026, anyone who is unhappy with their player can pretty quickly LLM their way into adding any missing functionality or tweak behaviour they don't like, or just make a whole new player.

I like Amberol's approach - no library management, just use the file-system. I use Picard to organise my music into a sensible directory structure, and so Amberol can see that and play by album or artist. It's really nice.

It's crippled by its ridiculous refusal to see symbolic links. I want to use symlinks to create "playlists", without having to copy music files around, but now, to Amberol, it's as though sym-links don't exist.

I looked into it, and it's down to weird Gnome and Flatpak policies, which are bizarrely averse to sym-links, because they are a "security risk". Yes, that's kind of true if you are root, but who runs their music player as root???

I have lots of music in exotic formats and an installation of foobar2000 that plays all of them. I keep using foobar2000 even though I switched to Fedora KDE because I don't see any alternative that will allow me to play music without forcing me to convert everything. Also, I have an Android app to control foobar2000 from my phone.

Big downsides are that scaling is broken on Wine so the UI is tiny. Moreover, whenever I manually change tracks using the mouse, it lets out a massive fart before continuing normally. But I can live with that.

Hmmm, now that I think of it - I've never made any GUI app. Suppose I want to write my own music player, what's the best way to approach this?

I'm using and enjoying https://github.com/gmt4/mpvc which is just mpv+shell, it covers most of my needs: offline, internet radio, and streaming.

Previous HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013149

Oh this is a funny topic; I just found myself looking for a decent music player on linux like a month or so ago and the situation was... disappointing.

The nicest looking one I could find was amberol, but that was a bit too minimalistic for me. I like minimal UIs but that doesn't have to translate to minimal feature sets as well.

But in the end I didn't find any simple but hackable players that I liked; in the end I just settled on audacious because it's just simple enough in terms of UI and good enough in terms of features. I do like the playlists as tabs idea though.

I like using Cantata, a Qt-based MPD client. Because it's Qt it fits in nicely on my Plasma desktop and because it's an MPD client it is quite good at keeping my collection organised. I do have my default music player set to VLC because I don't like using Cantata to play random audio files I want to listen to (by which I mean 'which sound effect is this wav file').

Bring back Harmony! It was beautifully simple.

For me peak musicplayer UI is still my customized foobar2000 setup on Windows.

I need a waveform, a playhead, a good browser that can do both metadata based libraries and dumb folders fast and without lagging, a way to build/save/view/load playlists and a way to queue songs.

Most players are just too basic or make the wrong or to many assumptions about my collection. Or the interface is just too cute and dysfunctional for my actual daily use.

This means on Linux I currently use either mixxx or just VLC player, but I surely haven't tested every possible mediaplayer.

My friend made this site to try and surface the best place to buy music: https://streamtoshelf.com/

He also made a section of the site that allowed you to login via Spotify and it would aggregate your listening history and tell you how much it would cost to buy all of your most listened to albums. Annoyingly Spotify seems to restrict the oauth app creation process, so users have to be invited by email to access that.

On Windows i have used foobar2000 since i had a crt monitor that got too dark for winamp so about 20 years. In 2 years daily using Steam Deck as my main computing device and trying almost every linux music player. I settled on using a spare android phone running Symfonium + Navidrome on Raspberry pi. As nothing on linux comes close.

I am still with Spotify, but for local playback I like ncmpcpp with MPD. My wishlist is for a native client that, in addition to local playback, integrates well with various streaming services like Spotify, online radio, Jellyfin, etc. But it's a hard problem. When I last checked it seemed Clementine used to be a good candidate for this but the Spotify plugin, at least, was no longer working at the time.

TBH the only thing I care for (except maybe for playlist management) is gapless playback. There's no word about it, but I constantly find out that the new players do not really care about the gap, while the music I am listening to is always ripped from my personal CDs and they mostly have music continuing on two or more tracks. Why nobody cares about it?

Do you know this feeling when you get towards the High Hopes on The Division Bell and there's this ugly crack in between tracks?

For anyone who self hosts their own music library with Plex or Jellyfin, I'd recommend keeping an eye on Chromatix[0]. It's a great client for Plex or Jellyfin based libraries on macOS and Windows, and a Linux version is on the roadmap.

[0] https://chromatix.app/

Wow, 120 comments and not one person who uses mpg123[1] or ffplay[2] with shell scripts for playlists.

[1] The most minimal media player I know of. Written in assembly. Supports only MP3.

[2] The most minimal media player I know of that supports more formats than MP3.

Imo last good Linux player was... XMMS. Never understood why it went away from most distributions forever.

This reminds me the blog one would write around 2006. Not the text content, but the pixelated font and pictures of winamp wibe like that.

Myself, I am rather happily using mplayer - without any gui. Initially it was practicality of not leaking memory - like many gtk+ apps would do. Now, it is pure utility.

After going through most of the rest I settled on Elisa as a good amalgam if winamp and itunes UX. I didn't realise it is obscure judging by no mention of it here.

https://apps.kde.org/elisa/

Have Spotify exposed their core API’s so that users can build a nice client interface?

Weird timing, I was just lamenting today how limited Linux music players are. The best looking one I've found is still Amberol but it doesn't even save your music. Then again the music player selection on Windows isn't that much better

Strawberry is a really good one.

Audacious comes with Game Music Emu (Thank you Blargg!) for playing original game music data (nsf, gbs, spc, etc)

I'm still looking for that perfect spotify replacement though

Whats the most similar to something like AnyTune?

https://www.anytune.app/

Cool. I didn’t know there was a fork of clementine. I hope it fixes a few bugs I have. It’s clearly my favorite player ever. Thanks.

I want to switch to Roon, but the lack of a web client (let alone a native linux client!) makes it a total dead end.

So, why do they look so clumsy all together? I am using Audacity with the XMMS theme. That's what I am used to.

Super surprised nobody mentioned Sayonara - practically native winamp for linux

Doesn't even mention MOC.

What I don't understand is how we let XMMS die?

Honestly, the best (if you don't mind a TUI) is MPD + a TUI client like ncmpcpp or rmpc. Lightweight, fast and since it is a server, you can control it from outside. You can even output the stream in various format to give be able to play it from anywhere, although if it is having your own self-hosted spotify that you want, just use navimdrome.

Came here to note that contrary to what is said here, Lollypop is not "new", nor is it representative of current so-called "GNOME-isms".

It uses UI idioms and technologies (gtk 3) of its mileage, 2017.

Ohhh I just remembered Amarok!

In conclusion, nothing simple and aesthetic like Winamp v5, Vox.app v2, or Aural.app (current), not surprising.

No mention of ncmpcpp?! Pshaw.

I for one still like the good old Cantata. It's still maintained by the community after the original dev bailed out, and it has good UX and lots of features. Feishin is also great but it's way heavier on RAM being basically a glorified website and all, so unless you have a reason to have Navidrome up and running it's overkill for most people

mocp is all you need

Cries in DeaDBeeF

This is frankly one of the areas of Linux that I'm most disappointed about. I tried a number of these options for local players and found them all to be terrible. Especially considering that I really like the specific layout I've used for well over a decade on Foobar2000. I actually ended up installing Foobar2000 through Wine because of my frustration, only to find that it wouldn't start reliably.

  ```bash
  export WINEPREFIX=${HOME}/.wine-foobar2000  
  winetricks allfonts  
  for packg in vcrun2003 vcrun2005 vcrun2008 vcrun2010 vcrun2012 vcrun2013 vcrun2015 vcrun2017 vcrun2019 vcrun2022; do winetricks -q $packg; done 
  winecfg # Set Windows version to 11
  ```

One more vote for FOOBAR2000 under WINE.

I'm about to flee from macOS. Can't buy new Apple hardware any more because that will come with their atrocious new OS, and I have exactly zero hopes for any improvements in the future. So my next computer has to run Linux, and this article (and the other comments) is a very welcome aid for the transition.

[dead]

Complaining about predatory business practices while dumping all your money to Taylor Swift is like giving the homeless guns and complaining about rising murder rates.

I'm a little surprised that anyone still plays music on their computer. Surely now we've moved into the era where we all have dedicated devices for that. Your phone for 99.9% of people, I'd imagine. And for the audiophiles there's a bunch of very high quality DAPs to pick from.