WAIT!
before you start commenting that TUI musicplayer xy is the best, my priorities:
must have:
- support for m3u playlists (synced to Android with Syncthingy) should autodetect them in a single folder I use also for the music files, and read/write them
- support for viewing all files
- support for custom music directories
- support for deleting music files
- Flatpak OR clutterfree on KDE
would like:
- Pipewire output
- nice simple GUI
- modern, clutterfree design OR customizability
- subtitles, cover images, etc.
I used G4Music which looks awesome and has minimal playlist support. It works really well but it cant write to the playlist. It is blazingly fast, and I made an issue, offering a bounty for write-to-playlist support.
I found Lollypop, the old GTK UI is way better than the Qt alternatives, while still kinda ugly. But it seems to tick all boxes, apart from Pipewire support.
What I tried:
G4Music
- UI perfect
- no file deletion
- no playlist addition
- no playlist creation
Lollypop
- UI is bareable
- pulseaudio, no setting at all
- playlist support including writing to! You need to enable it
- lots of internet stuff for artwork and subtitles
- sane defaults
GNOME music
- does not detect my .m3u playlists
- slow
- needs pulseaudio
- settings are a joke
- no folder view
Strawberry
- UI is horrible and not customizable enough
- no Pipewire support
- no .m3u detection
- cluttered, no UI zoom possible
- system icon theme is not applied
Clementine
- like strawberry but different?
- more online stuff
- interface less customizable
- cursor broken on the Flatpak
Amarok
- Strawberry in even older?
- bloat?
- retro-development status
MusicPod
- UI hides too much stuff
- no playlist support
- no filesystem hierarchy support
- strange Ubuntu look, but good UI, fancy background
- no podcast backup file support (so Kasts is better for that)
- but pipewire support!
Plattenalbum
- no playlist support
- otherwise looks great
Resonance
- modern, GTK4 Libadwaita, UI is damn lit
- freezes, fills up the entire RAM (scans every title at once!) -> not optimized at all, made system freeze and needed to hard shutdown.
- no playlist support?
- no pipewire support?
Melody
- uses soon EOL GNOME 42 runtime
Amberol
- beautiful but too minimalist
- why are there soo many GNOME music players??
moosync
- very nice UI
- electron: tiny cursor on Wayland, no Pipewire support
- plugin support for Youtube, Spotify (using librespot) and LastFM
- local playlists seem broken