2024-11-20

Mucking Around with Music Players

Subsections: [ Pure Media Players ] | [ Library managers + media players ]

I use Linux. Initially I bounced around all the 'mainstream' distros like Ubuntu, Manjaro, KDE, PopOS!, etc. but these days I'm a solid Debian fanbot. It's simple, it usually doesn't break. I first committed to the switch (Windows 10 -> Debian) after Microsoft announced Windows 11 in all of its... weirdness. Most of the software I relied on either already had native linux versions or comprable open source alternatives; I rarely have to run anything through a compatibility layer. So generally speaking, the penguin hasn't let me down!

There is one thing that I've found my computers to be lacking though. That being a decent music library manager + player! Now, in fairness, I didn't have any software for this on Windows either. Most of my music files just sat in a folder on my second HDD waiting to be opened in good ol' Windows Media Player. But this just means that any solution I find is already an improvement!

I don't really need much in terms of a media player. Pretty much all of my music is organized into folders by artist/album (and many have cover art downloaded too). The big exception to this is ~6-7GB of mp3s my friend ripped from his CD collection in Itunes and generously shared with me, none of this is organized. Because of my setup, all I really need is a player that will sort by directory, autoplay an album through, and has a decent looking interface.

Also it's worth noting that some of these will do videos too, I just don't use them for that so I can't comment on it.

[ Pure media players ]

> VLC

VLC is pretty epic. It's stable, simple, and will play just about anything. In the past, whenever I've ran into weird issues trying to open certain encodings in other media players, VLC always seems to save me. As far as I know, there isn't any library management function, so it's just a media player (and CD/DVD player, web stream player, live TV player, etc. ).

> MPV

I like MPV too, honestly its kind of my go to for just opening a file to listen to it (outside of actually listening to an album). I also really like that it will run entirely in the terminal if needed. It's light, easy to use, and in my experience pretty stable. It also seems to come preinstalled with everything now.

[ Library managers + media players ]

> Cmus

Cmus is just fun. Its a music player & library manager that runs entirely in the terminal using NCurses. Sure, the interface looks like it's out of an 80's computer system. Sure, keybindings take a couple tries to get used to. But it's lightweight, and its all TUI! I love TUI programs, TUI programs are just the best.

> Audacious

Audacious is a pretty solid music player. I don't like that it doesn't have proper album support, and I rarely use playlists. However, it has happily played everything that I've thrown at it. Its pretty light, I like the user interface, and although I don't use the playlist functionality that much, there isn't anything wrong with it. It's intuitive to use, and kind of a middleground between pure media players and library manager type software.

> Rhythmbox

I honestly haven't delved that deep into Rhythmbox. When I have used it, it's worked fine. At first, I found the interface a little jarring to navigate, but that might just be my smooth brain talking. I've heard that it's geared more towards large media libraries and serious digital music enjoyers.

> Lollypop

I honestly just found this one a few days ago. So far, I really like it. It has a pretty clean interface, similar to that of Plex (the media library thing). However, what impressed me was how it handled my poorly sorted collection of albums and CD rips. Upon pointing it towards my music folder, Lollypop began indexing all of my songs, automatically sorted them by album/disc, and then gave me the option of going online and grabbing all of the album art that I was missing. It did take a bit of manual work, but Lollypop honestly made it pretty painless to sort and beautify my music collection. As for the actual player interface, it's pretty clean. You can sort by artist, album, or year, and it does a good job of ensuring that everything is readable and not too cluttered. Overall, I really like this one; it's pretty.

I also want to add that you can disable Lollypop's online features entirely; I did this after getting the album art sorted.

[ Anyway ]

Thats my rant for the day. One of the things I've grown to really appreciate about Linux as a daily driver is how many options there are to solve a problem. Yes, in some cases too many options can be a bad thing, however for the most part it's nice to be able to pick and choose what you want/need. Anyway, maybe I'm too deep into it. I'll leave it at that for now.