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!
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.
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!
TIL rhythmbox still exists.
Fooyin is also a solid choice.
I like cmus best. It is both as simple and as complicated as I need it to be.
I just went on a journey looking at different local music players.
Just tried Rhythmbox. It’s not terrible, but not great either. It looks very bare bones.
Of the ones I’ve tried, I like Elisa the best. I spent a ton of time getting HQ artwork and quality metadata on my files and Elisa really shows that off. Rhythmbox barely shows any artwork. I just have two complaints about Elisa. First, Qt apps just don’t feel right in Gnome for various reasons: fonts are often too thick, icon contrast is bad, and Qt theme is weird for non-Breze. It also has weird scrolling behavior: it has forced scrolling smoothing and acceleration.
Runner up is Sayonara. It’s Qt based, but actually feels decent in Gnome. Overall I like the UI more than Elisa, but unfortunately it doesn’t handle showing my library as well. Artwork is duplicated (it shows albums multiple times if songs in them have different years) and some artwork is inexplicably missing.
I use mpd and ncmpc++, myself. My library got too large (Just shy of 70,000 songs now) and all the GUI players choke and freeze when I try to scan my library, including Rhythmbox and QuodLibet. I’m kind of interested in how inori develops, since ncmpc++ isn’t getting any active development beyond fixing bugs when things break with updates, but I’m also pretty happy with it for now.
I just read that navidrome
Handles large libraries!
Plays well with gigantic music collections (tested with ~900K songs - 2/3 FLAC, 1/3 MP3)
Though, I don’t know if any of the supported Subsonic API clients can handle as much…
I dont have a library that big, but I would recommend trying the Feishin desktop player if using navidrome. It’s a solid player in my experience, and has a smart playlist creator UI which the navidrome webui does not include.
It still can’t sort or browse by album artist, which makes it a real pain to use. You have to apply a patch and compile it from source to make it usable.
is there any alternative that works for you out of the box?
There’s musikcube if you’re looking for a terminal based player.
I used to use cmus before the streaming services got to me
cmus forever!
I think its almost perfect, just need a plugin to be able to show lyrics synchronised with the song
I’m happy with just reading lyrics on the browser lol
I’m old fashion, I put the synchronised subtitles on the mp3 files manually as a hobby, using Musicolet on Android, but I can see why is not a thing anymore
