No mention of Cantata, nor acknowledgement of Amarok’s recent revival. Whatever the reason might be for those omissions, this article doesn’t do a very good job of representing the state of linux music players.
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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audacious deserves a shoutout which is missing from this list; it's basically foobar for linux with some additional features like system tray mode, winamp skin , and missing drag and drop folder generation (although it still works if you make a new playlist tab)
I like Audacious but for the life of me either because I'm too stupid or too lazy but on NixOS I can't get winamp skins to work.
All I need is VLC and MPV
Quodlibet is pretty nice and has been my default for a good decade now. However, it still being on github makes it difficult to contribute to since I left Microslop's ecosystem.
I wish there were something out there in Rust that were extensible, but plugins seem to be difficult in rust.
I'm happy with Quod Libet as well. There are a few quirks that annoy me but, yeah, overall 👍
One more here. I use it, because it has a builtin pitch shifter, which I need for playing guitar to.
What are the quirks btw.?
The one I like to use was not mentioned. It is called Gapless (g4music) and is available on Flathub. Basically, you just specify a library location and based on metadata it sort things. The Flatpak requires minimal permissions by default, but you can disable Network permission because it only uses it to song album art (which in most cases is embedded in the song file itself).
there’s really no need to have a giant translucent strawberry in the middle of my screen at all times.
Alright, so, how do we tell 'em it can be toggled in the settings?
I use tauron and the ui is nice but god dam I find using it to be confusing
MPV?
Yes
mpv --shuffle --force-window=yes
for opening a playlist.
--force-window, because some tracks might have cover art, while others don't, which causes mpv to hid and then again show later on, causing it to pop up on top of other stuff you might be doing.
I'm looking for this exact rundown. If there is anything close to musicbee I'd love to know.
Personally, I favour Aqualung. But really, it's all a matter of taste.
Really nice overview