DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player
154 comments
·February 12, 2025renegat0x0
Other fun music players:
webnrrd2k
Just to add to the list: mpg123 [0]
It's not "ultimate" by any stretch, but it's a really good command-line mp3 player, and the one I use the most. It's been a long time since I've researched it, so there may be better ones out now.
nataliste
* xXx_nataliste420_xXx is now playing In the End by Linkin Park [3:36] [Playing] [played 467 times] [Nu-Metal]
timonofathens
The old Amarok was amazing. I still use Clementine to this day.
I just don't like the cover art manager, everything else is jut right for me.
graemep
I used to use Amarok. I switched to Quod Libet because its better for some genres - e.g. classical where I want to browse by composer, not performer.
gpspake
Surprised media monkey never makes this list. I started using it initially because it worked work with my ipod but I still use it because if the visual UI. Cons are that it only works on Windows and there's a paid version. I've been investigating players over the past year and I've installed most of these but I'm always disappointed in how lacking they are in terms of just giving me a visually pleasing dark mode grid of album covers. It's nitpicky but it's something I absolutely want as a way to browse all my music.
spacebear
I’ve been using Tauon for a few years and have been very happy with it: https://tauonmusicbox.rocks/
cageface
You could add mine to that list: https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon
pathsjs
I'd be curious to try it but I don't understand from the site whether it is mobile only. It claims that there is a utility to sync with desktop but then it doesn't run on desktop?
cageface
It's both desktop and mobile. If you're browsing on mobile it will show you screenshots of the mobile app.
The sync app is separate, free app just used for serving files to the mobile app for syncing though.
hakfoo
I'm rather fond of QMMP, because being built with normal Qt5 and a very vanilla stock theme, it integrates nicely into my "You're going to look like Motif come hell or high water" desktop theming philosophy.
I also find that I never got into playlists, so something that can easily be coaxed to just swallow 100Gb of content and let me occasionally search for a specific track is my speed.
fph
It feels like music players are becoming a thing for old geezers, like everything that requires you to have your data on a local disk. The 'modern' approach is just streaming everything off the net, no local storage required.
(I'm writing this as a disapproving old geezer, just in case it wasn't clear.)
silisili
I must be an even older geezer, as I detest all the late wave music players that became full screen things that load music from everywhere.
I organize my mp3s into folders by genre, then named by artist - title. To play one I double click it from the system file browser, and just want a tiny, og winamp style player to open and play that one song. Or multi select for an instant playlist.
cwmoore
I've never found a playlist editor better than Winamp. Open a folder tree of all of my music and I could quickly enqueue an hour of exactly what I wanted to hear and if that changed, swap in a few tracks, or an entire album or act from a folder. It took a long time to build up my library and I knew it very, very well.
fluoridation
I do the same thing, and players (mostly on Android) that only support metadata-based browsing annoy me to no end. Like, just give a file browser so I can load a directory, for god's sake! It's much, much less effort than implementing a media library!
briHass
I've been using Music Folder Player (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.zorillasoft...) for over a decade for this very reason.
I think Android has now made this type of player almost obsolete. Every app has its own file sandbox and apps must go through an abstraction for media that works poorly.
whoisthemachine
> Like, just give a file browser so I can load a directory, for god's sake! It's much, much less effort than implementing a media library!
I see you don't know the challenges of disk access on Android for developers.
raffraffraff
Well I'm almost 50 and ripped my first (shit quality) 64kbps mp3 somewhere around 1998 or earlier. But I switched to a library view and stopped individually managing folders when iTunes first appeared (24 years ago?). I just concentrated on proper tagging, including mood and instrument. I spent that more time ripping CDs and using tag editors than worrying which folder they were in (but that took care of itself with good tags). With a library you can still play an album, or a whole artist catalog, but also a whole genre, a mood, all you top rated music, or an automatic playlist that plays your least recently played, or least played but highly rated music from a mood, instrument, genre etc etc.
These days I use musicbee which has extremely customizable views, so you can browse your music however you want. My wife tends to pick a specific album, whereas I tend to be in a specific music mood so I hunt around for tracks and make a two hour playlist for it. She'd be happy with folders probably but it would kill me not to be able to search for instruments and moods. How else are you going to get a trumpet and piano playlist? Remember every song name?
silisili
> Remember every song name?
I know it's crazy, but yes! Nothing drives me crazier than seeing an actor and trying to remember where I saw him/her in before, and hearing a song I know but don't know the name.
I use Shazam liberally but it's pretty bad at the non mainstream stuff. I end up finding it with searches and screenshotting it for my reference.
Not that you asked any of this, but I -have- to know the name of a song I like.
jszymborski
Does that mean you need to click on the next song to play ever ~3m ? Because that sounds worse than having to flip the vinyl every ~5 songs.
silisili
It depends. In short, in that workflow, yes. But that's normally because I'll think of a song or get one stuck in my head I want to hear, as I don't listen to music all day.
You can also multiselect files or folders to open as a playlist, if that's your thing.
nxpnsv
Infinite autoplay of stupid recommendations is so annoying too.
ekianjo
You don't need to always listen to new pieces of music to enjoy music. Once you realize that you can focus on owning the stuff you like and listen to that most of the time
edgarvaldes
Plexamp is a good player for your local files (personal server) that you can stream.
hnuser435
I use it and it's mostly great, but the experience on Linux desktop isn't the best as it feels like primarily a mobile app.
RealStickman_
There's a large and growing number of music players for streaming from your own server. You get the best of both worlds by owning your music and having it accessible anywhere.
oceanplexian
They are all so poorly written though.
None of the OSS media players come even remotely close to the UX of Spotify, and that's speaking as someone who has paid way too much for Roon because it's at least 80% of the way there.
pfych
I've really been liking plexamp on my phone & desktop. It's not perfect & I've recently swapped to just using an iPod but it was good while I was using it.
attendant3446
UX of Spotify - you mean annoying podcasts, ads for the concerts by the bands you've never heard of and mixes with ghost artists?
My main issue with Spotify is how bloated it is, how they ruin the UX with almost every update.
conception
Evermusic https://apps.apple.com/us/app/evermusic-cloud-music-player/i... is pretty solid.
yapyap
eh, for the masses yes but it depends on what people u surround urself with.
cullumsmith
If you are a KDE user, I highly recommend fooyin, which is essentially a Qt6 clone of Foobar2000:
worble
I've been using strawberry since moving to linux since there was no good foobar2000 replacement but I just discovered fooyin these past couple of days and this is so convincingly close that I can pretend it's just foobar2000.
That's not to throw any shade on strawberry, it's also incredibly good, but foobar2000 will always have it's claws in me.
lousken
thank you! i thought i had to use elisa for the rest of my time it's still missing some foobar stuff but i like it
TiredOfLife
Unfortunately it has the same problem as all flatpak software of breaking network shares on restart.
garciansmith
There are also .deb and .rpm packages: https://github.com/fooyin/fooyin/releases
hnuser435
Off-topic, but Depeche Mode's Exciter came out in 2001!
mikae1
Another vote for fooyin! A foobar2000 like player that feels right at home in Plasma is a dream come true.
Avshalom
DeaDBeeF has been my goto for a while now because it's the only linux music player with the extremely specific feature I used in winamp:
enqueue is an arbitrary list so you can have a playlist, leave it in order and/but/then play a song multiple times in a row. everyone else it's a toggle so you enqueue a song and then enqueue again and it removes it; if you want to listen to a song multiple times before moving on you have to add it to the actual playlist multiple times and I do not want to do that.
literally the only important feature to me in a music player.
riidom
Qmmp does that too! It's (with deadbeef the primary) my secondary player, where I have a short playlist with songs that are meant to loop an indefinite amount of times.
cwmoore
Does it have "Stop after current track"?
samplatt
>music player with the extremely specific feature I used in winamp
If you have any windows boxes around, WACUP (WinAmp Community Update Project) is a recent-build of winamp without the bullshit. And includes the Enqueue feature.
aidenn0
cmus does this as well.
scblock
Some people I know love it but it just doesn't work for me in the way I use a music player. It's similar to foobar2000 in some ways which depending on your preferences can be good or bad.
And the name is terrible.
Strawberry is better for me but still kind of janky. Quod Libet and Rythmbox would seem closer to my ideal interface-wise, but scored massive own goals they seemingly will never recover from. How in 2025 music players refuse to (not can't, refuse to) get "Album Artist" right blows my mind.
Since I subscribe to Plex I find I'm using Plexamp more than anything else, but that's not really open source.
liotier
> Strawberry is better for me but still kind of janky
Strawberry isn't the most solid program (a few times a year, its search hiccups and gets stuck for a few seconds), but it carries the torch of Clementine's UX - which is my ideal music listening experience.
Lammy
Which itself carried the torch of Amarok 1.x's UX. No software rewrite, not even GNOME2→GNOME3, ever hurt me as much as Amarok 1.4 → 2.0
Compare Amarok 1.4: https://amarok.kde.org/files/amarok14/shot7.png
To Amarok 2.0 alpha 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110820190636/http://blog.lydia...
It was so widely disappointing that the “Amarok 2.0 FAQ” had an entry for “IMO Amarok 2.0 looks terrible” even though that's not a question lol https://web.archive.org/web/20090208231357/http://amarok.kde...
Luckily the Clementine project came along to deliver a straight port of Amazon 1.4 from Qt3 to Qt4 which was all 99% of people really wanted.
*James Rolfe voice* What were they thinking‽‽
liotier
Right - how could I forget Amarok ? And I too was pushed to Clementine by Amarok 2.0
kstrauser
Ouch. I loved Amarok 1.x back in the day. That was... something.
fleshgolem
I have tried A LOT of different music players over the years on Linux and the amount of ones that do not offer a single easy way to find a given album by a given artist is truly maddening.
I have recently landed on Tauon which has a pretty particular UI that is pretty unlike most others, but after some getting used to worked well for me. Audacious is mostly fine as well, but at some point I did not want to use it anymore because it would just stop responding to MPRIS events too often
For remote playing I have been really enamoured with Navidrome (in combination with Symfonium) lately. It's not super pretty, but it really has the best organization of albums I have seen so far and I kinda just dont use it for local files, because I dont want to do everything in the browser...
cosmic_cheese
Music players are a great example of a type of app that at first brush seems simple and difficult to do badly, but in reality is littered with subtleties and bits that hinge on the preferences of the user, all of which can make or break the app.
Makes it easy to understand why there’s more players than can be counted but few worth using.
wang_li
That's because they all try to be more than they should be. I don't need or want a visualization option. I don't need or want an equalizer. I don't need or want a library. Those functions properly belong in other places or in the waste bin. My music library is on my filesystem and is sorted and arranged as I prefer. When I want to play an album I drag it over to MPC-HC. When I want to create a custom playlist, I open the playlist and drag songs over in the order I want. I don't need a psychedelic visualization, my use case for playing music on my pc is as background audio. The function of an equalizer is to make up for shortcomings in my speakers and belongs there. The media player should convert an encoded file into PCM data to be shoved out the DAC. Leave the file managing to my file manager. The sound shaping to my speakers. And the crap frequency domain visualizations in the trash.
vunderba
None of this is universal.
Putting the equalizer upstream at the speaker level means that all of your audio is affected by it. And yet there are many times where I am playing certain types of music, such as classical or tracker impulse chiptune that needs some adjustments - i'd much rather be able to adjust it at the playlist and/or player level.
The advantage of a music player that builds a library from a set of folders is that it's infinitely faster to be able to do fuzzy searches particularly around metadata such as Idv3 tags.
Etc. etc.
cosmic_cheese
I’ve of two minds on this. On one hand I agree, because the more functionality a music player has the more likely some of it will miss the mark, but on the other hand I find file managers as they currently exist are somewhat inadequate and incapable of fully replacing a library management system in a music player.
Without going too far out into the weeds, lack of integration between filemanagers/filesystems and music players is the main problem. File managers aren’t conducive to sorting by audio file metadata - even those that support it force the user to manually enable those columns in list mode and support is spotty across file formats, meaning the user has to fall back on “hacks” like modifying filenames to sort properly when sorting by name.
Additionally, the browser-type design that’s dominant in file managers doesn’t lend to versatile use with other programs.
This is one area where I think BeOS had the right idea. There, audio metadata was accessible by way of the filesystem which made it easy to access by applications and meant that the file manager more robustly supported sorting by that metadata. Additionally, the file manager was similar to that of Classic Mac OS where windows were dead simple and each represented a single folder, which made it easy to use a file manager window as a playlist window.
ragazzina
>My music library is on my filesystem and is sorted and arranged as I prefer.
How do you manage albums that could be classified as two or more genres?
carlosjobim
Are you sure that you actually want to use a computer to play music?
kyorochan
It sounds like you don't need or want a music player.
null
FpUser
Perfect. The only thing left is to convince every other user to share your opinions. </s>
ruuda
Quod Libet handles album artists properly with the right sorting options? (And also it's one of the few that supports original release date, another seemingly essential feature that few players support.)
In Musium (https://docs.ruuda.nl/musium/) I also handle collaboration albums that have multiple album artists, based on Musicbrainz album artist id.
scblock
If they changed something in the last year, maybe. But last time I dug into this in detail they screwed it up out of the box, specifically by refusing to use the same mp3 ID3 tag that most other software including Picard uses. So for FLACs it worked, but for MP3s it did not, until I went in and edited the code.
At the time, the developers claimed changing it to work as people would expect it to would break existing user workflows and so they wouldn't do it.
reverendsteveii
>And the name is terrible.
The name is just a piece of hacker lore from back in the day
scblock
I know what it is, that doesn't make it good.
ryandrake
It's amazing how bad software developers are at naming their projects. At least this one is unique enough to be searchable, and could probably be SEO'ed above the computer lore (indeed, at least for me it's already #1 for "deadbeef" on the Google SERP).
The worst are when they pick a generic English word for a project that has nothing to do with that word. I'm not going to name and shame, but there are so many examples of new project that get posted to HN monthly that have irrelevant and unsearchable names. We see things like "Show HN: Banana - A lightweight URL parsing library in Rust". WTF does URL parsing have to do with bananas? How do you expect that word to be uniquely searchable back to your project??
flyinghamster
I really miss Foobar2000 on Linux (I've tried it a few times with Wine, and was never impressed vs. running it natively on Windows), so this looks like it might be just up my alley - especially since it has custom tag support.
dsp_person
Still using wine+foobar2000 as my music player here. The only issue I can think of is sometimes when when turning my screens off and back on, the UI might be glitched and need a restart.
throwawee
> (I've tried it a few times with Wine, and was never impressed vs. running it natively on Windows)
Really? I noticed it's slower to start up but other than that it seems the same. I use it pretty regularly because foobar components handle formats the others can't.
Other than that, I'd say Audacious is the closest Linux analogue to foobar2000. My one big gripe was freezing up for a bit when a stream cuts out (blocking socket?) but they fixed that.
flyinghamster
Last time I tried it (quite long ago), I recall having some audio issues. Maybe I should try again... that was back when my old audio interface (that only ever worked on XP, since they never released production-grade drivers for Win7) finally died.
lelandfe
> How in 2025 music players refuse to (not can't, refuse to) get "Album Artist" right blows my mind
Apple Music on macOS broke album artist (click the artist column a few times) a few releases ago and you now have to resort it on every launch. Maddening. They then added an explicit “sort by album artist” column which… does not work.
aidenn0
> How in 2025 music players refuse to (not can't, refuse to) get "Album Artist" right blows my mind.
And many of the few that get "Album Artist" won't respect tags that set the sort order for it either. If you are lucky, they will at least special case "The" so that "The Beatles" are under B, but they'll still put John Denver under "J".
The only one I know of that gets both of these right is cmus; I don't choose to use a terminal-based music player, I'm forced to.
foresto
> runs on GNU/Linux distributions, macOS, Windows, *BSD, OpenSolaris, and other UNIX-like systems.
> Each platform’s native UI toolkit is employed to deliver the best experience
> GTK2, GTK3, ALSA and PulseAudio on Unix systems
If the author is here, please understand that there is no "native" UI toolkit for Linux or BSD. These platforms have several widely-used desktop environments, some of which use the Qt toolkit instead of Gtk.
For what it's worth, Qt is an excellent cross-platform toolkit, and does a far better job than Gtk at looking and feeling native across all the major desktop environments and operating systems. You might consider it instead of Gtk for future work.
idoubtit
> If the author is here, please understand that there is no "native" UI toolkit for Linux or BSD.
You're wrong. When a library is native to some system, it does not mean that it is always shipped with the system. It means that it runs directly, without an interpretation layer in the runtime.
So GTK3 is native to Linux/Xorg. The desktop environment is irrelevant, and may not be based on GTK3.
foresto
The phrase "Each platform’s native UI toolkit" suggests that each platform has one specific native toolkit. That misconception is what I was addressing.
To put it in practical context, apps built with Gtk generally stand out like sore thumbs on Qt-based desktops like KDE Plasma, both in the way they look and in the way their widgets respond to input. This rather undermines the app's claim "to deliver the best experience" with its choice of UI toolkit.
But if you like, go ahead and believe that I'm wrong instead of trying to understand.
LargoLasskhyfv
There are 'hacks' around this, which style one toolkit/widget set from another, in combination with themes/styles for these. Not for any combination by far, but some do exist. I think that started with RedHats Bluecurve. And then got harder with with later GTK3 and their forced (lib)Adwaita-crap and CSD.
lmz
By that logic GTK3 would be native to Windows as well.
Heikete
Consider that for many GTK is also native. Mate/Gnome has been a standard for many years. Personally I'm getting more problems with Qt apps than GTK. Especially: font rendering, once a year or so Qt apps revert to outline fonts (I use bitmap OTB fonts as desktop font - i like pixel perfect quality in small sizes) or worse stop rendering font at all and I get empy menus. Second thing is IME support this also breaks very often on updates. Why Qt neglects such basic things I don't know, but because of the above I cannot call Qt 'excellent'
cosmic_cheese
DeaDBeeF already has both GTK and Qt UI plugin options, so just use the one that’s most native to your desktop (GTK: GNOME/MATE/XFCE/Cinnamon, Qt: KDE/Trinity/LXQt). If those UIs aren’t sufficient for some reason, since they’re plugins they can be forked and tweaked or if one was so inclined, they could write a whole new UI plugin. No need to wait on the author.
And while it’s true that Qt fits into a GTK desktop better than the reverse, I still find myself preferring using apps written with the toolkit that matches the desktop in both cases.
jerhewet
MusicBee https://www.getmusicbee.com/
Very (very) longtime user, with just under 10K albums I can peruse. Took me a while to tweak everything in the UI to my tastes, but now I can't imagine using anything else to listen to streaming music.
And yes, I really do have that many albums. Most of them are LP's and CD's, the rest are from places like Bandcamp (https://bandcamp.com/jerhewet).
z3n0n
My favorite Linux one these days: Gapless. (simple but beautiful) https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.neithern.g4music
conception
The thing that’s missing for me is discovery. Release Radar and the Discovery playlist and related artists on Spotify (for me) are currently top tier. I get introductions to artists no one else has with songs I often like. Last.fm used to do this? Maybe? But doesn’t seem like it anymore. Other streaming services, apple, tidal, quobuz, youtube, all seem lacking in one aspect or alter. Are there options on this?
mariusor
Last.fm is still there and it's still supported by almost all players on linux. Even the ones that don't have a specific plugin for last.fm, there are player agnostic scrobbling clients. I wrote one for all MPRIS compatible players - which is basically all of them - and it includes other free services that work similarly to last.fm: libre.fm and ListenBrainz.
j4cobgarby
For me spotify's suggestions used to be good but degraded over time. I wonder if ChatGPT would be good at this? I assume so
bsimpson
I don't subscribe to the FOSS purism you often see in Linux projects.
But there's something refreshing about seeing a tool that just gets more useful over time. Contrast that with closed-source software, whose features are driven by OKRs and might vanish if a new PM decides they aren't promotion-worthy or important to the next billion users.
I do wonder about hygiene and vision on such projects. On the one hand, seeing what happens when dozens of people over the decades have all written players for their own weird pet format is cool. On the other, I imagine a lot of that falls out of maintenance if the guy who wrote one looses interest, or if the project gets ported to a platform he doesn't care about.
I also expect that the Linuxisms of "everything is a setting" and "control density over visual appeal" are natural consequences if nobody is in charge of setting a vision.
killerstorm
I know DeaDBeeF's lead dev (O. Yakovenko) from a game dev forum I frequented ~20 years ago. IIRC I regarded him as one of most competent people on said forum: he was an actual professional game dev, perhaps capable implementing a whole game from scratch, whereas most ppl on the forum were amateurs.
Although I don't use DeaDBeeF as my primary music player anymore, back when I did, I wrote a plugin for using VgmStream with DeaDBeeF around 10 years ago, so I could more easily listen to video game soundtracks directly from the game files. For whatever reason, I have continued to maintain said plugin despite that I only use DeaDBeeF to test updates to it.
It's not on the plugins list because I haven't bothered trying to get it there. I don't think that list existed when I wrote this. I approached the author about upstreaming it instead, thinking it would be a good compliment to the builtin Game_Music_Emu plugin for emulating various old video game and computer audio chips. They seemed a bit upset that people didn't want to maintain external plugins, but actually I didn't really mind doing so. Maybe I should look into getting it on that list some day.
Either way, if streamed video game music formats are up your alley and you like DeaDBeeF, then shameless plug: https://github.com/jchv/deadbeef-vgmstream