The art of the best music player
Just a heads up, I'm using Linux.
If u are anything like me u like finding good software. When I'm dissatisfied with a piece of my workflow on my pc I always look for a replacement. Be it the fuctionality, the looks or just some inconvinience that im having with a program.
Recently nothing had such an impact on my digital wellbeing like a new music player I've been using. But first some backstory about the music players that were almost good for my use case.
I tried a bunch, but quickly abandoned them as they didnt pass the vibe check after like 10-20 min. The ones I stuck with for long periods of time are strawberry, and qmmp.
Strawberry
So this player is a fork of clementine.
What I like about it is: nice design about of the box, with a few changes, good shortcuts, musicbrainz integration.
This is fine ⤴
What made me switch out: The sidebar - nice functionality, no customization and i dont like the looks.
This is not fine ⤴
What I would of liked: tabs for playlists, automatic refreshing playlists by directory - my music revolves around file dirs, not playlists.
Qmmp
Specifically with the winamp classic old theme, its nearly perfect.
I know that in the skin there is Audacious written, which is another music player. Thats because the skin was for it, but also works with qmmp.
What i liked was nearly everything, but the player had some problem with a few of titles for songs, where the language required cyrlic etc.
What made me want to switch was just the fact that it wasnt fullscreen. Probably very useful for someone using floating wm and has one screen, but I have a semi-dedicated screen for my music player so it was kinda useless for me.
The same can be said about the playlists as in Strawberry. No automatic refreshing, although there was an option to bind a refresh of a playlist, but there is no feedback if it has done something.
Also i can say there was some weird interaction with my wm, as when moving qmmp with a bind of super + mouse drag, only one window would move, for example a playlist instead of the whole thing. To move the whole thing that is stuck together was just mouse dragging, but the muscle memory always took over, so I had to stuck them back together again.
No lyrics or covers displayed by default is not that nice, but they can be displayed as a seperate window which is fine.
As Im writing this I also see that some albums just doesnt want to clump together for some reason.
Fooyin
The star of the show. Fooyin is a player inspiried from the Foobar2000 system. In my opinion is the perfect player. At the very list the best I've used.
First of all, this piece of software changed my whole music listening workflow. I have got a playlist that I've been maintaining from about 2017, and it is a giant mess of mp3s. So the past 2-3 years, i've been fixing it slowly, and building a system so that eventually I can make it clean.
Before this player, I've used a tool called Kid3, to fixup anything bad about my mp3s, as well as Picard. This player made me realize how nice is to have a lot of the same functionality of Kid3 directly in your player.
I can quickly imbed artwork, change tags, add lyrics etc. in seconds, instead of finding the current playing track and fixing it a little longer. This little overhead makes it really annoying after a while to keep fixing files, especially if u have a 1000+ files at the end of the day to change. But when u are listening to a song and see a wrong tag, and the edit is so pain free, u might as well.
There is also the way the player ui can be edited. Basically u can make the player look however u like. There is pretty much no limitation on what u can do. Inside every cranny u can fit another splitter or a new tab, its amazing. Well if it would be like that it would be really daunting at first. There are good starting layouts to start with, and then u can modify them, like I did.
One of the best features that I wanted to mention is the ability to change the look of the tracklist dependent on the current playlist. Its awesome, because I've got a CDs directory which I want to display as a collection of albums, but for single-track playlists like my mp3s mess, a single column mode works perfect.
The big feature i love is autoplaylists. Besically u give the player a query like %path% HAS "/your/directory", and its automatically updating based on this dirs contents what should be on the playlist. U can also combine directories with OR /another/directory. Its awesome, and there is way more fuctionality in this. U can make a playlist based on the track number, like only first songs of albums etc. Options limitless.
There are also file operations built-in. What that means it that u can manage ur whole library with this player.
Lyrics can be auto-synced to the words, kinda like in spotify, which is awesome. U can also edit them on the fly if something is wrong.
Every segment of this player can be customized, like even the playlist manager display thing. U can make it so playlists dont display their names, number of tracks, or change the order of displayed info.
The colors are also manually changed. There is themes but u can customize them and create ur own. A lot of shortcut customizability as well, so u can make it ur own.
So far the one thing that is annoying is the loading time of the 'Search artwork' function. This could be my internet problem though.
Check it out, try it out and see if u like it! I really recommend it.