The state of Linux music players in 2026

I for one still like the good old Cantata. It's still maintained by the community after the original dev bailed out, and it has good UX and lots of features. Feishin is also great but it's way heavier on RAM being basically a glorified website and all, so unless you have a reason to have Navidrome up and running it's overkill for most people

mocp is all you need

Cries in DeaDBeeF

I have lots of music in exotic formats and an installation of foobar2000 that plays all of them. I keep using foobar2000 even though I switched to Fedora KDE because I don't see any alternative that will allow me to play music without forcing me to convert everything. Also, I have an Android app to control foobar2000 from my phone.

Big downsides are that scaling is broken on Wine so the UI is tiny. Moreover, whenever I manually change tracks using the mouse, it lets out a massive fart before continuing normally. But I can live with that.

Hmmm, now that I think of it - I've never made any GUI app. Suppose I want to write my own music player, what's the best way to approach this?

Oh this is a funny topic; I just found myself looking for a decent music player on linux like a month or so ago and the situation was... disappointing.

The nicest looking one I could find was amberol, but that was a bit too minimalistic for me. I like minimal UIs but that doesn't have to translate to minimal feature sets as well.

But in the end I didn't find any simple but hackable players that I liked; in the end I just settled on audacious because it's just simple enough in terms of UI and good enough in terms of features. I do like the playlists as tabs idea though.

One more vote for FOOBAR2000 under WINE.

For me peak musicplayer UI is still my customized foobar2000 setup on Windows.

I need a waveform, a playhead, a good browser that can do both metadata based libraries and dumb folders fast and without lagging, a way to build/save/view/load playlists and a way to queue songs.

Most players are just too basic or make the wrong or to many assumptions about my collection. Or the interface is just too cute and dysfunctional for my actual daily use.

This means on Linux I currently use either mixxx or just VLC player, but I surely haven't tested every possible mediaplayer.

No mention of ncmpcpp?! Pshaw.

In conclusion, nothing simple and aesthetic like Winamp v5, Vox.app v2, or Aural.app (current), not surprising.

I'm a little surprised that anyone still plays music on their computer. Surely now we've moved into the era where we all have dedicated devices for that. Your phone for 99.9% of people, I'd imagine. And for the audiophiles there's a bunch of very high quality DAPs to pick from.