Update: This post generated a thread on lobste.rs with some more recommendations and thoughts from the friendly folks over there!

If you haven’t heard yet, in big 2026 we’re all ditching Microslop for systems that actually respect you, and we’re also breaking up with our ever-pricier Spotify subscriptions in exchange for actual ownership of the media we consume. So, for Fun February, I thought I’d take a look at some of the apps we can use to fill the Spotify-shaped void.

The manifesto, which you can skip if you do not care about the self-righteous Linux user rant

At this point, I strongly believe even straight up piracy is better for artists than streaming. At least looking up your favorite artist on Soulseek doesn’t pop up a dozen ads and two AI-generated ripoffs that Spotify would rather you listen to as they profit more from them.

But copyright infringement is only good when multi-trillion-dollar corporations do it to feed their LLMs. Us peasants are still bound by regular laws. So do not Google “life of a showgirl torrent safe no virus”. Instead, you can just… buy music for cheap.

The never-ending vinyl trend cratered prices of CDs, and even new releases can be found for under 10€, with older ones available for half that, especially if you look up sales. If you aren’t too bothered by a lossy format, iTunes - yes, that iTunes, the Apple one - will sell you DRM-free music on release day just like in the good old days. Finally, most music that’s not released on a major label finds its way to Bandcamp, which is another venue for lossless DRM-free music.

Of course, we’re not living in the stone ages anymore, so no one expects you to carry your Discman or iPod around. It takes whole of five minutes to pop a CD into a cheap drive and rip high-quality FLACs onto your drive, which you can then stream from wherever you are in the world. Yes, this advanced technology that took Spotify almost two full decades to figure out can be yours in just a few simple steps through servers like Jellyfin or Navidrome running on your own hardware.

You might say that owning is more expensive than renting, even with all the price increases. Sure. But I’ve paid for Spotify for ten years, from 2014 to 2024, and that’s a solid 1200€ with the old pricing. At the end, I had nothing to show for it. My carefully curated “library” was not mine - it was held hostage by a company that can up the prices at any point. If I stop paying, it’s all gone. And it’s not like the artists profited from that exchange either - one purchase of an album easily pays them more than a thousand streams, and realistically I do not stream most albums a thousand times.

At a time when copyright, and laws in general, only seem to apply selectively, I would rather directly support the artists whose work I enjoy and who need it. And for the rest… well, Taylor already got my right kidney for the Eras tour tickets. I’m sure she won’t mind if I give Opalite a few spins without selling my left one too.

The competition

Anyway, with that out of the way, I wanted to take a look at the state of Linux music players in the current year. I went to nixpkgs and searched for “music player”, which gave me about 200 results. Then I narrowed it down to a handful of actual desktop music players that are also not streaming services.

I looked for features that I would expect to find in an average streaming app:

• Appearance: Modern, intuitive user interface. Looks like a desktop app, and not a blown-up phone app. Designed for human use (no CLIs). Celebrates music as an art form (doesn’t look like an Excel spreadsheet).
• Native: Respects common protocols - I can run it in the background, control the player with keyboard shortcuts, and it shows up in my shell as a music player.
• Performance: Snappy navigation. Works reasonably well with a moderately sized music library.
• Features: Has a concept of a “music library”. Fast, quality search. Playlists and play queues are easy to access and control. Respects existing metadata, doesn’t mess up my files by enforcing its own scheme.

The following is by no means an exhaustive list of Linux music players, but I think it covers a nice range and hope it helps someone discover something new. I also tried to surface only the apps I either thought were good or had a lot of potential - if I thought something was downright bad or if it didn’t work I just skipped over it, as all of these apps are free and open source and someone, somewhere put at least some effort into them.

Amberol

Amberol is “a small and simple sound and music player that is well integrated with GNOME.”

This barely fits my criteria for features. But you know what? I kinda like it! Super minimal, no library management (beyond restoring your previous playlist when you load it up), but what it does, it does great. The waveform on the scrubber is a very nice touch. Looks great for very casual listeners, or maybe as your default app when opening an audio file.

Euphonica

Euphonica is an “MPD client with delusions of grandeur”. To set up Euphonica you will also need to set up MPD, which is not tragically difficult, and you might even prefer it over a bespoke library isolated to a specific app.

Euphonica has been my daily driver before I embarked on this journey, and it’s fairly straightforward with a few flourishes on top. You have your album and artist pages, a queue, playlists, and nice extras like synced lyrics. I also think it’s the prettiest one in the list - there’s just enough flair to the UI that it seems like it’s “glowing”, the album art is given ample space as it deserves, and the (optional) background visualizer is very tastefully implemented.

It’s not without its quirks. The UI chokes a bit with large collections, and despite my best efforts I’m unable to get photos for any artist except ABBA for some reason (maybe the developer is Swedish?). I also wish it had a song search function, more sorting options, and that re-ordering the queue could be done with drag and drop rather than buttons. My biggest complaint, however, is that changing the volume requires using my scroll wheel on the volume knob. At least let me click and move it up and down.

Feishin

Feishin is “a modern self-hosted music player”. You will need a music server of some description: Jellyfin, Navidrome and Subsonic are supported.

Feishin is by far the most feature-complete player on this list. If you want your “personal Spotify”, this is it. The user interface is very customizable, there’s not just search but a goddamn command palette for easy keyboard navigation, and the entire experience is very reminiscent of what you’d get from a streaming service if it cared for the user rather than the shareholders. This includes recommendations (from your own library), highlights, statistics and other fun stuff. Sure, a lot of it is powered by Jellyfin itself, but Feishin presents it in a coherent, understandable and friendly manner.

Not everything is perfect. Since Feishin is an Electron app that talks to your (potentially remote) music server, there are some obvious web-isms, like the in-app notifications and spinners while content loads, as well as the icky feeling of running yet another Chrome instance. You also depend on the Electron audio stack. However, those rough edges are generally minor, the important stuff works well, and the entire package is absolutely worth your try.

Lollypop

Lollypop is “a new GNOME music playing application”.

I really want to like this app. The album of the day feature is very cool - a small, simple, but thoughtful feature (even if it did try to get me to listen to Weezer’s Blue Album - not today, Satan!). I like that it opens up on the “suggestions” page instead of an alphabetical list of Everything. It supports YouTube music playback. Someone clearly cares about this a lot.

On the other hand, the user experience is painful. The onboarding flow that gives no indication of the next step, the hidden sidebar that magically appears when you resize the window, the fact that you need to click the “plus” button next to the “Reset collection” label in the settings to add a directory to your library (and yes, I understand that ‘Reset collection’ is a button in its own right, but it only looks like a button if you hover over it), the location of the queue (hidden in the “Playing albums” item in the sidebar)…

I get that these might be GNOME-isms, but they are bad GNOME-isms. You absolutely can make a good app with GTK4 that looks like it belongs on the GNOME desktop. You just need to ignore everything the GNOME developers tell you to do. Be brave! I believe in you, Lollypop!

Plattenalbum

Plattenalbum is an album-focused MPD client. “Browse your collection while viewing large album covers. Play your music without managing playlists”. As with the previous MPD client, you will need to bring your own MPD.

Plattenalbum is kinda like Amberol if you strapped basic library search on top of it. If you want to occasionally listen to a full album and you generally know what you want, it’s going to get you there. The UI is pretty clean and minimal, although (another GNOME-ism) what you see is what you get - there are barely any customization options to speak of.

I want to like this concept - it’s reminiscent of the Longplay app which is an album-focused Apple Music client for iOS and the Mac. But Plattenalbum falls a bit short. You cannot even see a list of all albums in your library or sort by anything except the weird ‘Lastname, Firstname unless it’s a band then Sorta Alphabetically unless the name starts with “The” or “A”’. There’s also no support for multi-disc releases. I think there’s a lot of potential here, and I hope it gets realized over time.

Recordbox

Recordbox is “yet another music player for Linux, built with GTK and Libadwaita for the GNOME desktop”.

Recordbox had the best onboarding experience by far of any app on this list - click the prominent button, choose your music directory, wait for the obvious progress indicator to fill up, bam, done. You’re dropped into a very comfortable three-pane library screen reminiscent of iTunes when it was good.

From there I was also very happy to just hit Ctrl+F, be placed in the universal search bar, look up albums, artists or tracks, and have a few obvious options on what to do next. The app feels snappy even when rapidly scrolling through hundreds of albums. It even properly shows multi-disc albums. Another thing that I appreciated is that albums are grouped in the queue, so if you queue a couple of albums you can see (and also re-order!) them as whole units rather than a bunch of tracks.

I could nitpick the “now playing” section which seems a little bit unfinished, and some GNOME-isms like putting some settings into the Settings window (good) and some settings in three-dot menus (why?). But, all things considered, and given that it’s a pre-1.0 release, I’m really impressed by what the developers did in what seems to be a little over two years. Great job!

Strawberry (Clementine, Amarok)

Amarok needs little introduction - it was the Linux music player of its day, back when getting the audio drivers to work was a cause for celebration in its own right. It heavily influenced Clementine and Strawberry. I’m grouping them all together because Clementine and Strawberry both look like Amarok’s UI was dragged kicking and screaming from late 90s into the early 2010s, and out of those three, Strawberry seems to be the most prominent one, while Amarok is kinda buggy on my WM.

Both Clementine and Strawberry seem functional, but out of the two, Strawberry looks marginally better with the context pane and slightly more consistent design. The interface is still less intuitive than I’d like it to be, and there’s really no need to have a giant translucent strawberry in the middle of my screen at all times. The foundation seems solid, though, and I really think that this venerable lineage of music players could reclaim its crown as the undisputed king of music players with a clean new design that streamlined the experience, trimmed some of the cruft, and modernized the appearance to match the rest of the Plasma desktop.

Tauon

Tauon is “the music player of today”. (It seems like the tagline used to be “Linux desktop music player from the future”, which sounds way cooler, but okay…)

I’m going to be super honest here - I never liked the “everything-is-a-playlist” approach of a specific breed of music players. Some people swear by it, but I find it overwhelming and confusing.

Nonetheless, if this is your vibe, Tauon seems solid. The UI is a bit reminiscent of a DJ deck - I think it’s the default color scheme and the stretched icons. Being a native app, it’s super snappy, and scrolling through 8k+ tracks feels smooth, even if the scroll bar is on the left of the window for some reason. Navigation is not super intuitive at the start, but it certainly gets out of your way as much as possible and I see how I could learn to appreciate it with a little bit of effort.

Tauon also seems to support Plex, Subsonic, Jellyfin and even Spotify as network sources, includes tag management options, a lyrics editor and Discord integration if that’s your jam. It certainly gives Feishin a run for its money in the features department. Overall, if you’d consider yourself a “power user” and you’ve been looking for a Linux version of foobar2000, this is the app for you.

Summary

If you have a Jellyfin or a Subsonic-compatible server, and even if you do not but are willing to spend a little bit of time setting one up, Feishin is the obvious choice. It works great, looks modern, and has tons of features. Once you set it up, it’s super simple to use.

For local playback or for the Electron-averse, Tauon is definitely the power user’s choice with all of its intricacies. Otherwise, Recordbox is shaping up to be a really good choice, and Euphonica is still my pick if you already have an MPD server running.

If you’re just looking to play a few tracks now and then, I don’t know why you’ve been reading up until now, but Amberol is super cute.

Honestly, I’m really happy with this. I started looking into this feeling a bit desperate, but there’s actually a vibrant ecosystem of native Linux apps out there, with people building things they care about, and even if all the features aren’t all the way there yet, it’s much better than it was. I hope these trends continue!