Linux

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that spotify sucks, they hate artists but love Joe Rogan. If you can't buy albums via bandcamp, Tidal offers quality and royalties far superior to Spottily. You can transfer your playlist in a few clicks and the price is almost identical (6 accounts for like $15/m).

mpd + ncmpcpp

MPD + ncmpcpp, I hate both and I'm yet to find anything better.

DeaDBeeF Player, I like lightweight and simple music players.

Fooyin's great so far as a Foobar2k alternative.

VLC because it works with everything and it doesn't try to organise my music collection for me.

First it was Amarok, then Clementine, and now it's Strawberry.

vim

Quod Libet

dd if=/dev/urandom | aplay

I tried several and I very much appreciate Quod Libet

That said I'm interested in trying others' suggestions 👌

I have been bouncing between CLI/GUI and several there of. On the CLI side I'm flipping back and forth between cmus and musikcube. I prefer cmus as it seems faster and has vim key motions an commands, but I like the TUI of musikcube better, its just got soo much extra stuff I don't use. I'd love to find a rust rewrite of it that trimmed out the web-server and most of the plugins as I never use them (and yes all you suckless heads I know, I could edit source and rebuild it but... Ain't nobody got time for that).

Another point for these is being able to detach them, both work fine in detached sessions so I can start an album or playlist and just say that's it, back to work. I use Zellij but I imagine using tmux or whatever would work just as well.

Now as for graphical apps I tend to use Amberol or Rhythmbox depending on what I'm doing, honestly both go fairly unused most the time. But I like having options, Amberol is more geared towards playlist style music so mixtapes or albums not shuffle all. Whereas Rhythmbox will let me just click my library and go ... both have good integrations to the widget stack in gnome and cinnamon as well as bars like nwg panel and Waybar.

Ooh had a fun though and tested. Musikcube works better in tty mode. So I will sometimes open second users in tty mode with ctrl+alt+f(1-5) or even clone a session into tty mode. and i just checked and cmus doesn't draw the whole screen only whats highlighted. so if you have to drop back to shell or something musikcube is the better option... although i imagine if you're in that situation music players and such are not high on the priority list :/ .

Spotify-wayland on hyprland. And I also definetly dont have SpotX-bash, a great spotify adblocker installed!

Foobar2000, which is a Windows application but available as a snap using wine.

I really want to use DeaDBeeF because it is Linux native and has similar customization features (I like big album art, for example), but sadly its library management leaves a lot to be desired compared to Foobar's. I don't want to have to generate a playlist every time I want to listen to an album, nor do I want to have to clear that playlist when I'm done.

I haven't found any other player with even remotely similar customization available.

MPD + Cantata
For the most part I just lump all my music into one playlist regardless of album or genre, but day to day I also use several different computers, and I find MPD to be the best for syncing configurations across all of them. Cantata also allows me to see album artwork and track information really easily and has good touchscreen support compared to terminal-based MPD clients.

mpd + ncmpc

I am but a simple man. All my music is FLAC. It is arranged neatly in folders. I just want to select an album to play. I do not need album covers, playlists, search, streaming, tags, lyrics, analyzers, or scrobbling.

Spotify 🫥

Foobar2000 has been here for YEAAAARS, and I don't think there is a good enough equivalent for linux, and by that I mean playlist tabs, global shortcuts, etc