DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player
45 comments
·February 12, 2025cullumsmith
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.
encom
foobar2000 actually runs very well in Wine.
mikae1
Another vote for fooyin! A foobar2000 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.
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.
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.
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??
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‽‽
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.
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.
null
FpUser
Perfect. The only thing left is to convince every other user to share your opinions. </s>
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.
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...
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.
riidom
Tried a lot of music players so far. Currently Deadbeef is my default one, despite two things I don't like:
a) The search could be a bit more fuzzy (search "ade" and you won't find "adé")
b) importing a directory takes ages; what takes me 5-7 minutes is done by Quod Libet in <10 seconds.
Otherwise, love it!
DecoySalamander
The killer feature that made me switch to DeaDBeeF was the replaygain scanner that works out of the box. I just wish it would integrate better with the KDE environment.
cosmic_cheese
DeaDBeef isn’t my primary player, but it does have some interesting capabilities that I use it for from time to time such as the ability to list chaptered AAC files as separate tracks (making it easier to navigate them).
The way it supports alternative UIs by way of its plugin system is interesting too. It’s neat to have a native GTK UI under a GNOME desktop, native Qt UI under KDE, and native AppKit UI under macOS with the same program.
the4anoni
Naah, foobar2000 FTW!
cess11
DB is quite nice. Don't know if it still supports it but back in 2017-2019 it was possible to use terminal commands to control playback, similar to what one might use a more complex tool like mpd for, which I wrapped in Picolisp to be able to easily change the music without leaving the REPL and then hooked it up to a socket for remote control over the LAN.
ge96
It's funny how a UI can look old. This looks like what Python Tkinter would spit out. Anyway at least for me software like this is more tangible nowadays (I could make it) though I'm not much of a music person (programming related to audio).
I also used to have mp3s but not anymore, with Spotify, SoundCloud, BandCamp or YouTube with UBO.
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