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!

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/

TIL rhythmbox still exists.

Are there any music players that will play my mp3s and stuff but also let me play audio from youtube or spotify without logging in? On android I use Musify, which does this but is a little wonky.

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.

I like cmus best. It is both as simple and as complicated as I need it to be.

Side question that may be relevant since this is for local collections. Does anyone have a recommended tool for ripping and tagging audio CDs (e.g. with musicbrainz support)?

can anyone suggest a tool to re-assess all my ripped mp3s and flacs with artist/track title info? I ripped ages of music from CD, and at some point a lot of the data got dicked up.

Fooyin is also a solid choice.

I really just want a media player that:

1. Has good media library support based on tags (lots do)

2. Has ReplayGain support (lots do)

3. Lets me have an album art panel bigger than a thumbnail (and here is where so many options fall short, including Rhythmbox)

Deadbeef seems to be the closest due to its good customizability, but the plugin which allows for actual media library capability is apparently Mac-only, for some unfathomable reason.

Gonna be stuck with Foobar via Wine for a fair sight longer, I think.

I’m currently using Sayonara, but Rythmbox is perfectly fine too.

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.

I like Strawberry, for two reasons:

• It was the first player I found that supported playing directly to a pipewire sink, without going through the Pulseaudio compatibility layer.

• It can stream hi res FLAC files from Tidal.

I really really don’t get why you just can’t organize your music in plain old folders with rhythmbox. Not Playlists, not Meta data. Just folders. Ist it that exotic? Is it that hard to implement?

I use mpd and ncmpc++, myself. My library got too large (Just shy of 70,000 songs now) and all the GUI players choke and freeze when I try to scan my library, including Rhythmbox and QuodLibet. I’m kind of interested in how inori develops, since ncmpc++ isn’t getting any active development beyond fixing bugs when things break with updates, but I’m also pretty happy with it for now.