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!
TIL rhythmbox still exists.
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!
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.
Awww… iTunes is that bad now? Man…last time I used iTunes was probably 2010 or so. Bummer.
I’m just going to use this opportunity to publicly grieve again for Winamp fake becoming open-source: https://hackaday.com/2024/10/16/winamp-taken-down-too-good-for-this-open-source-world/
I like Strawberry, for two reasons:
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It was the first player I found that supported playing directly to a pipewire sink, without going through the Pulseaudio compatibility layer.
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It can stream hi res FLAC files from Tidal.
I never managed to make Tidal work. How did you do it?
+1 — I tried getting the gosh darn API key for hours with no success. Share your secrets (original commenter)!
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I prefer Quod Libet but I have fond memories of rhythmbox.
Fooyin is also a solid choice.
the UI kinda looks like a QT based Rhythmbox. I’ll give it a try later 😀
It is heavily inspired by foobar2000, one of the GOAT under windows IMHO.
Rhythmbox has been my main music app for over 15 years now. Every now and then I’ll check out other options but I always end up back after a couple days.
I do wish they would give the UI some attention. Nothing major, just a few visual tweaks to bring it inline with modern Gnome (the alternative toolbar plugin is really close)
I personally would like the album cover to be a bit larger
Same, I just really want the automatic playlists feature, but no other music players that look nice on gnome seem to have that. Pretty much all newish players are so minimal
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!
Clementine or strawberry for me
Same for me. I was using foobar2000 back on windows. When I switched to linux I found out I set up my foobar basically the same as vanilla Clementine was set. So I was sold instantly. Later switched to Strawberry, because I felt Clementine is too long dead and it also started to glitch icons on newer qt for me. Strawberry is great.
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.
Just felt the need to say our music libraries look very similar. You have great taste.
I really enjoyed Elisa too! It looks modern and does a great job at showing off metadata 😁
But I still sticked with Rhythmbox because of: 1- it’s GTK based, and I’m currently on Gnome (the reason why when using KDE, I stick with Elisa) 2- I kinda did not understand how managing playlist in Elisa works? Maybe I missed something, but Rhythmbox just seemed more simple and direct to the point with that.
But yeah, I do agree with you that Rhythmbox really lacks in the “showing album covers off” space. But in my personal usage, I don’t tend to be looking at the UI of the music player on the desktop anyway, since I usually just play music on the background while doing other stuff.
On mobile (android) on the other hand, I’m enjoying Gramophone for not only showing larger covers, but also matching it’s own Material You colors to the respective music you’re playing, it’s neat :p
It’s an amazing music player and shit podcast app
I’d rather use Lollypop.
I am also a fan. Nicely shows album art, and has the “play similar” feature which I find to be very useful. I just pick one album I know I want to listen to, and it chooses the subsequent albums.
mpd for me
I like cmus best. It is both as simple and as complicated as I need it to be.
