I’m switching from foobar2000, which doesn’t support Linux. I’ve been using EndeavourOS on my laptop for months now and it’s been pretty good, and now that my Windows PC constantly shuts down when I sleep and the default settings app crashes, I’m planning to switch my Windows PC to Arch too. Of course, in the worst case I could always use wine, but I’d prefer something in my OS’s theme.
Either Qt or GTK would be fine. If I need a plugin to have one of the following features, that is also fine.
I’d really like a visualizer, preferably black 'n white spectrogram.
Coverflow, which is what you see in the center (note that this album cover has 5x5 squares; that is not a feature of Coverflow). It puts album covers with a reflection in a 3D space. It doesn’t have to be in the shelf-like layout as you can see in the screenshot, but it would be greatly appreciated if I can configure it to do that.
Lyrics search and display from Genius, QQ & NetEase music
ReplayGain read support.
Bonus points for (ordered by decreasing importance):
ReplayGain write support.
An external always-on-top window to display the lyrics.
Customizability (being able to move the position of panes inside the app around)
File tagging. Ex Falso serves this purpose pretty well.
Discord Rich Presence integration. I know, I know, I just like showing off my music collection to my friends.
Timed lyrics are lyrics that sync to the time of the song, usually in the .lrc format you can search up. You can see it in the top bar. The part highlighted in blue is the lyric that is sung during the currently playing part of the song.
From what I’ve seen of strawberry, the lyrics don’t even automatically scroll.
I just found out about DeaDBeeF. Unfortunately, it’s not what I’ll be using.
It is quite a one-to-one match to foobar2000! It has the same modularity and customization. However, the plugin ecosystem is nowhere as big. There’s no Coverflow plugin.
And there was a lyrics plugin, forked after an earlier plugin stopped development. However, the developer quit after decreasing passion coincided with the DeadBeeF developer removing the already finished Russian translation in the wake of the Russian war for whatever reason. Needless to say, I am not comfortable with it both feature-wise and ethics-wise.
Strawberry and all Clementine (or should I say, Amarok?)-likes don’t strike my fancies. They seem to be in pretty good hands, but I just don’t like the side-tab layout (plus the aforementioned problem with lyrics). Amarok seems to have switched their design, and since I plan on using KDE either way, if the usage is good enough and I can’t find anything better, I’ll either use Amarok or Sayonara, which also seems promising.
Guayadeque - awesome layout and UI (e.g. Last FM tab highlighting which of the items shown are in your personal library).
QMPLAY2 adds a ‘Download’ button where you can search and pull down new music.
Harmanoid does nice Lyrics display. I used OSDLyrics in the past, but not many lyrics engines work too well - it fails now spectacularly, but was amazingi when it did work (i.e. Lyrics appear on desktop, or in widget etc and scroll with the music karaoke style).
When I switched to Linux ( along long time ago now), the app that was the most difficult to replace was Foobar2000. You won’t find anything as good.
As you said, Deadbeef is the closest project but not as powerfull as Foobar.
As daily players I use Quodlibet and Lollypop. But I don’t need the timed lyrics.
Guayadeque is unmaintained now, and I’m not sure if wxWidgets respects the system theme. I’ll see if it still suits.
Downloading and video playing is not really what I’m looking for in a music player.
OSDLyrics looks really good! I’ll check it out. Not really much of a fan of how Harmonoid looks like a Windows knockoff though, and the layout is not really what I’m used to, but I’ll also check it out.
As you say, they’re not as powerful. Quod Libet is a good player but it doesn’t have the features I want. My opinion of Lollipop is similar to Harmonoid, except this time it’s iTunes.
Yup, crime of the century - I tend to use Strawberry more often now, it’s quite feasible to create playlists with rules and have them in tabs - so I have one ‘Balanced’ which picks a bunch of lesser played and adds more as they get played.
Other similar tabs exist with filters for Genre etc. and after Guayadeque, Strawberry is by far the best for pulling in lyrics and saving them in the file.
OSDLyrics looks good, but it just doesn’t work any more.
Something I learned very recently - many developers have no idea. I mean, the guy who develops ‘konsave’ has no idea of letting you type in a string, search and return results so you can enter an index number to select… instead, you have to type the file name exactly (a bummer when you save like ‘Dark-Hint-2024-01-05’ for a filename innit?
The same goes with music players, talking with devs, they are unaware of features available in other players.
