Please stop me if this is not the appropriate place to speak of issues like this one.
I believe an introduction is due. I have been a Ubuntu user for a little more than a year now and while the whole ecosystem is fantastic and smooth to use, it boggles me that there’s still no app that can match the versatility and easiness in use that Musicbee provides. Strawberry pales in comparison, foobar2000 is clunky and clumsy, Rhythmbox is really without any option for control over your library… Even Tauon (the most complete music player I have found so far) becomes overly, uselessly complex in certain moments. What’s your take on this issue? What do you use for browsing, editing and playing your music collection? Is there any way we’ll ever see something like Musicbee on Linux distros?
My take on this issue is that this sounds like a Musicbee promotion :p
How can a player that allows you to almost completely design your own UI be “clunky and clumsy”? foobar2000 can be anything from an unscrollable auto-generated playlist of “odd numbered tracks in the deathmetal genre” showing only “stop” and “play” buttons, to a dynamic / responsive UI that auto-scrolls song lyrics in time with the song that’s playing.
If you don’t like it, you don’t like it and that’s fine. Reading “clumsy” and “clunky” used to describe foobar2000 make me wonder what your approach to evaluating music players even is though.
Take this as a suggestion to give foobar2000 a little more time/effort. If you just aren’t into that though, I’d say Clementine is pretty solid.
If you add an edit to your post listing out your requirements, dealbreakers, and maybe giving a little detail on what you didn’t like about the players you listed, you’ll probably get responses that are more helpful :D
As a general rule of software, anything that is extremely customizable does tend to require more legwork to make it work for you. foobar2000 is nice, but it’s hardly polished from a UI perspective. Learning curves and customization get clunky in a hurry.
foobar2000 is the emacs of music players.
I still use the Windows version on Linux and my Mac. There is no replacing it.
That said, I do not think it is too hard for the average person to get a good usable UI with foobar2000, as long as they don’t mind the retro Windows UI style (this is a positive in my book). The DUI editor is pretty intuitive after you spend about 20 minutes plaing around with the sandbox. Foobar2000 2.0 added support for dark mode in Windows which looks really nice, but can be messy if you use any components that haven’t also been updated to support it.
Ahahah, alright I get it, but I’m no way sponsored by the one guy who built the software XD. But to answer seriously to your questions: the thing I loved about Musicbee was the ability to easily edit metadata of large collections of files seamlessly to a degree of precision and intuitiveness that, to me, feels unmatched. The integrated sound converter allows for compressing on the go. The UI is smooth and modern. The way it easily processed the addition of new files to the collection. It’s just a lot of little things which I keep on finding here or there with every new software that I try, but never all of them together, bundled into a simple package like MB. I know that foobar is considered to be just as versatile; but to set it up to work as nicely out of the box like Musicbee requires an investment in time and knowledge I don’t really have.
I use foobar2000 with WINE and it works for me. I have very minimal requirements for a music player and yet nothing native on Linux can meet them.
I need:
- Smart playlists that can update themselves when files are added to a directory
- Album Shuffle
- Play a random album on demand/hotkey
- Middle click scroll (this is the one that DQs most Linux players. I cannot scroll manually over my giant library. Even scrolling just artists is not feasible with my collection. I sometimes like to scroll around to pick something sort of random but not have to skip album after album with a button)
foobar2000 has had these for like 2 decades and I don’t understand why no one has recreated it successfully. Deadbeef and qoob are not as powerful as they would like to think they are.
Are these real program names?! Haha
But really, if it this program is good enough to keep using for decades I am going to check it out.
I called out those two programs because they’re specifically trying to emulate foobar2000 on Linux. I had good experiences with Audacious and Quod Libet as well if you haven’t seen those yet.
I hadnt heard of any of them, honestly. I tend to use vlc but I miss older winamp/windows media style players from the early 2000s. I will check them out, thanks for the recommendations!
A big thing foobar2000 does that apps like VLC don’t is library management. foobar2000 has really powerful and intuitive tools for tagging, renaming, and moving files around. When I buy new music, I drag it to an empty playlist in foobar then it’s just a few clicks to have all the files renamed following my perferred syntax, moved to the appropriate folder(s) in my library directory, replay gain calculated, and aac versions generated and ready to go to my iPhone and iPad.
This really only scratches the surface of foobar2000 though. It’s built in UI editor and extensive ecosystem of plugins makes it incredibly versatile and customizable. It is basically the emacs of music players.
It’s been a while since I used it, but my choice on Linux was always Quod Libet, which is a smidge barebones but also really powerful (especially with tagging).
Linux programs tend not to be monolithic. The power is there but is often split across a few tools rather than being bundled into one. Beets is incredibly good for library management and there are a bunch of good players around, my favourite being mod + cantata. Cantata is not bad for browsing and managing as well, and it lets you set up custom actions so you can open an album in something like puddletag if you don’t want to deal with beets.
Pretty sure that’s the opposite of monolithic
What is?
The *NIX philosophy, that you describe, is having a bunch of small programs do specific tasks. Monolithic means having one large thing do all the tasks. Maybe the confusion comes from the fact that the Linux kernel is monolithic. They tried to make a FOSS Unix clone before Linux was a thing, but I think they failed (see GNU Hurd). What it means for a kernel to be monolithic or not, I have no idea… I assume the same, but on the kernel level.
I know what monolithic means. How does my post relate to the kernel? I have no idea what you’re on about.
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I’m a terminal masochist, so I use
fzfcombined withmpv.I just use VLC and organize my music by folders. If I want to listen to a certain album, I go to that folder and have VLC play it.
Which is basically the same as how I use Foobar2k lol.
I use quod libet daily and prefer it over musicbee, it’s got a neat and simple ui with nice plugins
Exaile or Clementine?
i use elisa for downloaded music, and spotify for online
I use apotify-adblock from the AUR
For errm… reasons.
This is question for each and every open source software ever.
Making new stuff is fun. Polishing it to the point where no one will have problem with it, those last 5-most-boring-percents, is soul sucking.
Do you want music player that someone enjoyed making it? Or you want one where someone that was bored doing it and you don’t even know who that is? (this is first time i heard of musicbee, maybe they had fun and were enjoying making it, but i couldn’t find any name attached to that software. is it just one guy or multiple teams?)
Even if it wasn’t true for musicbee, it is true for most software out there.
I just want a good one. I am a dev myself and can empathize, but still.
when it comes to playing music, i use Amberol. it just queues up songs and plays them, it’s minimal but gets the job done. as for browsing my music collection, i just use my file manager (in my case, Nautilus). editing my tags is a bit trickier. Ear Tag does almost everything i need, but i still have to keep Ex Falso around for track number generation (i’m certain there’s a way to do it in Ear Tag, but i haven’t found it)
What about JRiver? It’s cross platform and as far as I know (I don’t personally use either) it does everything that musicbee does?
Strawberry !!
I use either Elisa on KDE or just cmus in the terminal
