No matter which system you're on, a high-quality music player is a must for every audiophile. If you're looking for the perfect Linux music player, look no more. In this guide, we will outline some of the best music players for Linux machines.
1. Clementine
Clementine is a robust music player packed with innovative features. It provides a fast and intuitive user interface that makes playlist management simpler.
You can use it for playing internet radios, downloading album art, lyrics, podcasts, and many more. Clementine is also available on Windows and Mac. So, you can use it across all your machines.
Download: Clementine (Free)
2. Audacious
Audacious is an advanced music player aimed at audio enthusiasts. It is fast and requires negligible hardware resources. This makes Audacious a great choice for people who're running Linux on older machines.
Plus, the highly customizable nature of Audacious allows users to manage their music any way they want. So, if you are looking for a minimal yet fully-featured Linux music player, Audacious is worth a try.
Download: Audacious (Free)
3. DeaDBeeF
DeaDBeeF is a modular music player app that runs on virtually every Unix system. Apart from its elegant interface, DeaDBeeF also supports multiple audio formats and allows users to convert between them.
Its high-quality tag editor makes tag management much easier. Moreover, you can choose from a wide range of useful plugins for adding additional functionalities. Overall, this is another example of a Linux music player done right.
Download: DeaDBeeF (Free)
4. cmus
cmus is a small but powerful music player for the Linux terminal. It is built on top of ncurses and offers a lightning-fast interface. Some of its notable features include gapless playback, audio streaming, customizable keybindings, etc.
Its Vi-style command mode is quite helpful to users who are comfortable using Vim on Linux. Moreover, cmus only uses around 15 MB of memory. This makes it one of the most lightweight audio players for Linux.
Download: cmus (Free)
5. Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is a beautiful music player inspired by Apples' iTunes. Although aimed at GNOME, it runs perfectly on most Linux desktop environments. Its main features include robust playlists management, burning audios, DAAP, podcasting, and remote control.
You can use plugins for adding extra functionalities. Rhythmbox can also be integrated with a large number of Linux utilities such as Pidgin, Nautilus, and XChat.
Download: Rhythmbox (Free)
6. Amarok
Amarok is a free and open-source music player available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. It has an easy to use interface, which makes managing large playlists easier. It's also one of the oldest Linux music players in active development.
Some of Amarok's notable features include integration with Last.fm, OPML Podcast, file tracking, etc. You can also choose from an extensive selection of ueful plugins.
Download: Amarok (Free)
7. VLC
VLC is one of the most widely used media players. It runs perfectly on Linux and is, therefore, a good choice for playing audio tracks. You can download VLC on Linux via your package manager or from the Snap Store.
Since VLC is a full-fledged media player, it offers many additional features than traditional music players. It has support for almost every audio format and offers advanced filtering options.
Download: VLC (Free)
8. Strawberry Music Player
Strawberry Music Player is a fork of Clementine and offers some exciting features. It's suitable for managing extensive audio libraries.
You can fetch album arts and lyrics from sites like Last.fm, Deezer, Spotify, and Genius. It also offers a robust audio analyzer and equalizer to help users tune their sound any way they want.
Download: Strawberry Music Player (Free)
9. Exaile
Exaile is an open-source music player developed using the GTK+ widget toolkit. Its straightforward interface makes playlist management easier. It can also fetch lyrics and album arts for your favorite tracks from the web.
You can choose from over 50 plugins for enabling things like scrobbling, internet radios, and audio tracking. Overall, Exaile is a smart music player packed with several useful functionalities.
Download: Exaile (Free)
10. musikcube
Musikcube is a simple but powerful audio player for the Linux terminal. It comes with a minimal console interface, making it one of the fastest music players on this list. You can also use musikcube as an audio streaming server.
Since musikcube is fully cross-platform, you can use the same player across all of your workstations. You can also run this on a Raspberry Pi with the help of some additional DACs.
Download: musikcube (Free)
11. Sayonara Player
Sayonara is a tiny but feature-rich music player for Linux written in C++. It uses GStreamer as its audio backend and comes under the GNU GPL open-source license.
It provides several ways to manage your audio libraries and has support for webstreams and podcasts. You can also use additional plugins to add features like crossfaders, equalizers, and broadcasting.
Download: Sayonara Player (Free)
12. Museeks
Museeks is a great option for people who want a modern yet resource-friendly music player. It has a sleek user interface paired with all the essential features you may want in a music player.
It runs smoothly on Linux, Mac, and Windows. So, don't forget to give it a try if you need a simple but elegant music player.
Download: Museeks (Free)
13. qmmp
Qmmp is a Qt-based audio player similar to Winamp. It also supports several additional user interfaces. You can run this music player in Linux, BSDs, and Windows.
Qmmp supports multiple audio formats, DSP effects, visual effects, projectM visualization, Pulse Audio, and ReplayGain. It can also detect removable media devices via HAL or UDisks.
Download: qmmp (Free)
14. Quod Libet
Quod Libet is a solid music player app built with Python and GTK+. It can scale audio libraries containing tens of thousands of songs without any trouble.
The user interface is also quite neat and appealing. So, give this a try if you're looking for a high-performance audio player.
Downloads: Quod Libet (Free)
15. Musique
Musique is a modern audio player that aims to increase your audio experience through its clean and minimal user interface. It's one of the simplest Linux music player apps in recent times. Musique is also entirely cross-platform.
Download: Musique (Free)
Best Linux Music Player Apps
Linux music players come in so many different flavors that it's often hard to find the perfect audio player for your needs. This guide aims to eliminate this by outlining some of the best music players available for Linux. Try some of these to see what fits you the best.