21 Best Music Players That Are Worth Trying On Linux

8. Spotify

It is a Swedish commercial music streaming, podcast, and video service that gives full view to the user as an online audio player. It is a cross-platform service that is available on almost all platforms.

Released in October 2008 by a Swedish startup Spotify AB, it got famous in hearts of 10 million+ users in no time and by June 2015, it has gathered a huge crowd amongst it which is around 75 million.

Spotify offers the ability to browse or search music by artist, album, genre, playlist, or record label. Spotify offers two music streaming services: Spotify Free with 160 kbit/s and Spotify Premium with speed up to 320 kbit/s.

Install Spotify Music Player

------------------ On Debian based Systems ------------------ 
$ sudo apt-add-repository -y "deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free" 
$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys D2C19886 
$ sudo apt-get update -qq 
$ sudo apt-get install spotify-client
------------------ On RedHat based Systems ------------------ 
# yum-config-manager --add-repo=http://negativo17.org/repos/epel-spotify.repo
# yum -y install spotify-client


------------------ On Fedora 22+ Systems ------------------ 
# dnf config-manager --add-repo=http://negativo17.org/repos/fedora-spotify.repo
# dnf -y install spotify-client
Spotify Music Player
Spotify Music Player

9. Exaile

A cross-platform music player whose latest release happened to be 3.4.2 in November 2014. It uses the GTK+ widget toolkit rather than Qt and is written in Python with the Gstreamer media framework.

With a plain yet the appealing user interface, this music player holds very much similarity to Amarok for most of its functionalities Last.fm support, fetching of lyrics, editing of tags.

Also, it provides devices support via external plug-ins. Apart from these basic features, it also provides some advanced features like ReplayGain support, Moodbar integration, previewing tracks via secondary soundcard, etc.

Install Exaile Music Player

# apt-get install exaile	[On Debian based systems] 
# yum install exaile		[On RedHat based systems]
# dnf install exaile		[On Fedora 22+ versions]
Exaile Music Player
Exaile Music Player

10. Guayadeque

Guayadeque is a free and Open source audio player written in C++ and made entirely for Linux was released in March 2009 under GNU General Public License.

Guayadeque has a user interface which is analogs to Windows Player Winamp and Foobar 2000 for Linux. Its features include creating and managing a complex music collection, Last.fm, and ReplayGain support, support for both lossless (e.g. FLAC, AIFF, AIF, APE, etc.) and lossy formats like Mp3, Ogg, mp4, m4a, etc.), access to SHOUTcast, seamless playback of music collection, manage podcasts in music collection possible.

Install Guayadeque Music Player

# apt-get install guayadeque	        [On Debian based systems] 
# yum install guayadeque		[On RedHat based systems]
# dnf install guayadeque		[On Fedora 22+ versions]
Guayadeque Music Player
Guayadeque Music Player

11. Juk

Another cross-platform audio player designed for Unix-like systems and Windows, JuK was released in February 2004. It is written in C++ and released under GPL.

JuK supports the collection of audio files of formats like Mp3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC. Some features that make it a part of the list are: Dynamic Search Playlists that are auto-updated, an auto-sync feature that automatically detects newly added songs to the music directory, guessing tag info by online lookup, tag-reading, and editing support.

Install Juk Music Player

# apt-get install juk	[On Debian based systems] 
# yum install juk		[On RedHat based systems]
# dnf install juk		[On Fedora 22+ versions]
Juk Music Player
Juk Music Player
Gunjit Khera
Currently a Computer Science student and a geek when it comes to Operating System and its concepts. Have 1+ years of experience in Linux and currently doing a research on its internals along with developing applications for Linux on python and C.

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32 Comments

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  1. Does any of these players have a “Quick sort and trash” functionality or can be modified to have one? The behavior I want ideally after activating “Quick sort and trash” mode with a button or script:

    • Playback of the file in playlist starts at 10-20% position. After realizing what I want to do with that file I press one of the custom sorting keys.
    • The player tags the file according to the configured value in settings for that custom key and jumps to the next file (to10-20% position).

    If the value is “delete” then it deletes the file. Alternatively, the player has a “delete all files with a certain tag” option that can have a confirmation prompt.

    I thought that Cmus could be persuaded to such behavior with Autokey but it does not seem to have any file modification functionality despite being a command-line tool.

    Quod Libet with Autokey might work, but it requires calling up a context menu to create a tag, no hotkey possible, which makes it slow and unreliable.

    Reply
  2. Thanks for this! I was having a rough time finding a music player that had a nice GUI and could handle 100GB of mainly mp3s (with maybe a dozen FLAC albums). Clementine is working fantastically, although the web site and Facebook community haven’t been updated since v1.3/1996.

    Reply
  3. I’m surprised mpg123 didn’t make the list. It’s a terminal/console based player but unlike some that use ncurses or are a TUI, mpg123 is a command line mp3 player along the lines of aplay/play. It’s low overhead is why I like it. Simply run it by issuing: mpg123 and it plays it. You can loop the file or use wild card as in *.mp3 for all mp3 files or use a file @ for a playlist.

    Reply
  4. Thank you for this useful comparison! I find that many players do not run on ARM platforms (e.g. Pi). What players would be suitable for ARM and provide a dsp (e.g. resampler)? I did quite some research myself but to no avail yet…

    Hope you can help.

    Reply
  5. One of the things that make Quod Libet really stand out is that it does not restrict you to using the official tag keys, something I’ve always been really annoyed with in almost every other player.

    You can make up whatever tags you like with QL, and since it’s interface is built dynamically (programmed by you in a simple markup language which can show info conditionally), it can look like this: http://imgur.com/5FrtwG0

    Reply
  6. Thanks for introducing to Tomahawk! This music player rocks! Fast start-up, modern and easy UI, many options. My favorite.

    Reply
    • I love Gnome Music UI, but I don’t like how restrictive it is with options and that took me to this article: doesn’t allow many (or any) customization options, you’re limited to the Music folder, you can’t open files from Nautilus directly and you can’t even set it up as the default app for audio.

      Hopefully I’ll find a replacement among this list, which is by far the most complete I’ve seen in a while, thanks tecmint for the great article :)

      Reply
  7. I am amazed not one talks about GMUSICBROWSER . It is simply the best music player on linux no questions about it. I am a music enthusiast and have been looking for a better music player and gmusicbrowser is the only one which handles all fine types and gives out best music quality.

    http://gmusicbrowser.org/

    Reply
    • @Zulfiqar,
      Thanks for sharing about GMUSICBROWSER, to be fact never heard about this music player, will include to the list as per your suggestions…

      Reply
    • Yeh, GMUSICBROWSER is ace! So customizable! That used to be my go-to browser but over the last year I’ve mainly been using Clementine.

      Reply
    • Banshee is wonderful unless; You have a large music collection, then it gets unstable and crashes. Does not play well with the Cinnamon desk top.

      Reply
  8. mplayer has been the default audio/video player for me for years. The console version is a no non-sense, simple and pretty efficient player. Also, though not a pure audio music player, VLC deserves a mention here because of the rich format support. CMUS looks interesting though. Thanks for sharing. Great list by the way.

    Reply
    • @Andrrew,
      Thanks for notifying about the YAROCK player, we’ve included in the list as per your suggestions, now the list grown to 21 Best Music Players, we will keep adding new music players to this list as per user requests..

      Reply
  9. But what about server variant?
    MPD / Mopidy is great, it has android remote and it can be run withou gui. There is a problematic youtube support, but in fact its all functional.
    Does anyone know a better server variant? youtube support, remote apk support, without gui.

    Reply

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