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?

  • Yote.zipEnglish
    7•11 months ago

    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.

    • StorksforlegsEnglish
      1•11 months ago

      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.

      • Yote.zipEnglish
        2•11 months ago

        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.

        • StorksforlegsEnglish
          1•11 months ago

          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!

          • @beefcat@beehaw.orgEnglish
            2•11 months ago

            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.