DeaDBeeF: The Ultimate Music Player

Although I don&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;s not on the plugins list because I haven&#x27;t bothered trying to get it there. I don&#x27;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&#x27;t want to maintain external plugins, but actually I didn&#x27;t really mind doing so. Maybe I should look into getting it on that list some day.<p>Either way, if streamed video game music formats are up your alley and you like DeaDBeeF, then shameless plug: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jchv&#x2F;deadbeef-vgmstream">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jchv&#x2F;deadbeef-vgmstream</a>

Other fun music players:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foobar2000.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foobar2000.org</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;volumio.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;volumio.org</a><p>- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rhythmbox.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rhythmbox.org</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amarok.kde.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;amarok.kde.org</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cmus.github.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cmus.github.io</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;museeks.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;museeks.io</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fooyin.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fooyin.org</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;audacious-media-player.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;audacious-media-player.org</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clementine-player.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clementine-player.org</a>

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 &#x27;modern&#x27; approach is just streaming everything off the net, no local storage required.<p>(I&#x27;m writing this as a disapproving old geezer, just in case it wasn&#x27;t clear.)

If you are a KDE user, I highly recommend fooyin, which is essentially a Qt6 clone of Foobar2000:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fooyin.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fooyin.org&#x2F;</a>

DeaDBeeF has been my goto for a while now because it&#x27;s the only linux music player with the <i>extremely specific</i> feature I used in winamp:<p>enqueue is an arbitrary list so you can have a playlist, leave it in order and&#x2F;but&#x2F;then play a song multiple times in a row. everyone else it&#x27;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.<p>literally the only important feature to me in a music player.

Some people I know love it but it just doesn&#x27;t work for me in the way I use a music player. It&#x27;s similar to foobar2000 in some ways which depending on your preferences can be good or bad.<p>And the name is terrible.<p>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&#x27;t, refuse to) get &quot;Album Artist&quot; right blows my mind.<p>Since I subscribe to Plex I find I&#x27;m using Plexamp more than anything else, but that&#x27;s not really open source.

&gt; runs on GNU&#x2F;Linux distributions, macOS, Windows, *BSD, OpenSolaris, and other UNIX-like systems.<p>&gt; Each platform’s native UI toolkit is employed to deliver the best experience<p>&gt; GTK2, GTK3, ALSA and PulseAudio on Unix systems<p>If the author is here, please understand that there is no &quot;native&quot; UI toolkit for Linux or BSD. These platforms have several widely-used desktop environments, some of which use the Qt toolkit instead of Gtk.<p>For what it&#x27;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.

MusicBee <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.getmusicbee.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.getmusicbee.com&#x2F;</a><p>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&#x27;t imagine using anything else to listen to streaming music.<p>And yes, I really do have that many albums. Most of them are LP&#x27;s and CD&#x27;s, the rest are from places like Bandcamp (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bandcamp.com&#x2F;jerhewet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bandcamp.com&#x2F;jerhewet</a>).

My favorite Linux one these days: Gapless. (simple but beautiful) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flathub.org&#x2F;apps&#x2F;com.github.neithern.g4music" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flathub.org&#x2F;apps&#x2F;com.github.neithern.g4music</a>

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?

I don&#x27;t subscribe to the FOSS purism you often see in Linux projects.<p>But there&#x27;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&#x27;t promotion-worthy or important to the next billion users.<p>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&#x27;t care about.<p>I also expect that the Linuxisms of &quot;everything is a setting&quot; and &quot;control density over visual appeal&quot; are natural consequences if nobody is in charge of setting a vision.

I know DeaDBeeF&#x27;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.

VLC <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.videolan.org&#x2F;videolan&#x2F;vlc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.videolan.org&#x2F;videolan&#x2F;vlc</a>

Tried a lot of music players so far. Currently Deadbeef is my default one, despite two things I don&#x27;t like:<p>a) The search could be a bit more fuzzy (search &quot;ade&quot; and you won&#x27;t find &quot;adé&quot;)<p>b) importing a directory takes ages; what takes me 5-7 minutes is done by Quod Libet in &lt;10 seconds.<p>Otherwise, love it!

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).<p>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.

Any other fans of Foobar2000? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foobar2000.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foobar2000.org&#x2F;</a>

DB is quite nice. Don&#x27;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.

At this point syncing playlists across devices is my main requirement for a music library player.<p>I still have Spotify but I mostly use Plexamp now and have pretty much phased out musikcube. I still have a musikcubed service container pushing a large playlist on repeat&#x2F;shuffle to a FM transmitter though.

I mostly use a simple music player made by a friend for my daily needs. The design is inspired from spotify and It works really great. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;H0lyDiv3r&#x2F;player">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;H0lyDiv3r&#x2F;player</a>

Has the bundling situation improved? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;DeaDBeeF-Player&#x2F;deadbeef&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2017">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;DeaDBeeF-Player&#x2F;deadbeef&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2017</a>

This one was always kind of buggy, it was hard to maintain my custom config and figure out which plugins actually worked. Stopped using DeaDBeeF after my similarly whimsical Linux ricing phase. Can&#x27;t recommend :&#x2F;

My go-to has been AIMP for years and it has the same set of features plus a bit nicer skins&#x2F;UI. Also an android version with the same feature set sans audio conversion.<p>Also, last update was in December, not in 2023.

I don&#x27;t need music player on my pc, because mpv can be used for playing music. It also supports zip archives, so albums from bandcamp can be played without unpacking

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.

On desktop, I am using audacious with winamp skin, but I haven&#x27;t found a music player on android managing properly my cue files...A bit annoying.

If I have to choose a music player I would go with aimp.

the immediate thought: why would I like to use it instead of foobar?

been using it for years. I prefer mpd but will use Deadbeef on linux and foobar on windows.

the ultimate music player was banshee. it was glorious :&#x27;(

Naah, foobar2000 FTW!

mpv for me. Why? Because I&#x27;m using it anyways for other stuff, like video, and it doesn&#x27;t scratch when I FF &gt;&gt; or &lt;&lt;. Not skipping to the next track, just fast forwarding within one, or rewind in intervals. Which comes in handy when &#x27;earsighting&#x27; new stuff, to sort it out fast without earbleed.<p>I mean, even yt gets that right in the browser. Why can&#x27;t dedicated clients?

But can it sync my 5th gen iPod Touch? Nope. Game over.

It&#x27;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&#x27;m not much of a music person (programming related to audio).<p>I also used to have mp3s but not anymore, with Spotify, SoundCloud, BandCamp or YouTube with UBO.