Linux Music Player Review

welcome back to switch to linux well i've been working on this video for a while and actually took a lot of notes back and forth and front and center and all this so let me know guys if you like this style of video we can do more of these they just take a little bit longer to produce but that's perfectly okay i'm all down with that i want to increase the quality anyway around here but we're talking about linux media player review what i did as i went through looked at some of the most popular or most common or most installed linux music players and i focus specifically on music players although some of these cross over and be video players as well but i want to focus specifically on what can you use on your linux box to sit down and list the music while you work so my test machine is going to be zorin this is going to be the latest zorin and it's going to be i just updated it the other day just to make sure we're we're as as up to date as we can be and then we went down and i took a series of notes on these different media players and uh the listing of things that i wanted to have a look at i want to look at the theming this is important if you're running mostly plasma based stuff or plasma xfce you might want to steer more towards a qt based if you're running gnome cinnamon budgie you might want to steer more towards a gtk theming just for better overall consistency i want to look at libraries which media players support libraries which ones don't support libraries and then for those that supported libraries i want to look at how do you manage the library do you have any control over it some of these music players don't give you any control at all some of them give you a boatload of control i want to look at what players minimize to the system tray so if you close the player it continues to play music in the background and then allows you to open it back up we wanted to look at just a general ease of use and how fast is the media player to load that one's actually fairly significant because some of the media players might take a little bit longer to load up and that means if you're just double clicking on a file on your desktop just to open up a basic media player and then it takes forever here's like i just want to list this file i want to go ahead and have a look at some of those the best example i can come up with on the photo end of things if your system accidentally opens up every time you double click on a jpeg [Music] it just takes so long to load although it's so good but you want to make sure that you have a variety of different media players for different purposes and so i wanted to have a look at some of those so what we're going to do here is we're actually going to start out and what i wanted to do first is let's look at two players which are basically going to be very quick loading fast media players that you can just load up really quickly these are kind of designed as your default players just if you need to double click something and listen to it particularly if you're in audio production you just need to hear a sound bite something very quick that's not going to add itself to libraries and stuff like that so i want to go ahead and have a look at two of those so jumping back over here on to zorin the first one i want to look at is mpv now of course uh i think it's celluloid on cellular i think it's celluloid on linux mint is based on mpv that one actually has a few more options than mpv has mpv has pretty much no options you can drag and drop a file here and allegedly you can drag and drop a url here the problem is that oftentimes the urls don't seem to play i looked into some documentation on this and it does seem to appear based on your system i tried to copy and paste some urls in i tried to just drag it from firefox over into here and i was not actually able to get urls to play but as far as if you wanted to just go ahead and open up any individual music file here then you can just go ahead and drag a file in here now just as a brief note i have disabled the desktop audio so you're not gonna be able to hear any music i did this for copyright purposes i don't want to accidentally click something and and then uh go ahead and get something playing but what we should be able to do is just drag and drop files into here and uh i thought i tested that earlier and it was working earlier but apparently it is not working right now so dragging and dropping into mpv is not actually necessarily the best option i generally don't use it that way anyway i do actually on endeavor that is actually how i use endeavor os i drag and drop files and if you grab a whole album and drop it over it will actually add them all to your playlist this one is really good for just for doing things like auto default openings so it's going to open up and it's going to play and we don't have a lot more than just some basic controls and things like that so i'm not sure what's wrong with zoran that's not actually allowing me to to drag and drop files over to it i assure you this does work on mpv on my endeavor os system it does load just files it is based on gtk theming and it does not minimize to the system tray very easy to use primarily if it's set as your default player and this will support music and video so this is what i like to install either this or something like it like celluloid on linux mint this is what i use as a default when i'm double clicking a video or a music file because it loads instantaneously it plays and then it's done so i don't don't deal with any of the other odds and ends back and forth involved here so the urls you're going to have some spotty interaction on your urls that's just going to be a nature of what is going on and then overall though this is set as a good default now the second player that we want to look at as a default is going to be dragon player so dragon player this one is based on qt so this one here if you're running more of a plasma or mate xfce something like that this one might work a little bit better for you this one has a few options with it it is also fast it is also ideal as a default player if i remember correctly i believe it will play um video as well although since this is a music one and i don't use dragon player otherwise it did not completely testif uh testify to that however the biggest downside i find is while you have the option here to play a file there is no option in the file dialog box to say show me all file options so you literally have to go in here and find the type of file you want to play and then you have to double click it from there so like okay i want to play mp3 and you can notice they're not in specific formats so let's go over to music you can actually open up mp3 files here and it is now playing of course you're not going to be able to hear it but it is playing you can hit the full screen option here if you want you can exit the full screen option again if you click the close button it's just going to stop playing you can of course on something like this and minimize it to the to the screen here um this guy here um it will as you saw it will play discs i don't see any specific um there you go click back to the play media button you can play your discs or you can play a stream so if you happen to have a some form of internet stream you can play any of those it will require codecs you need to make sure you have codecs and default involved in your system like mpv this does not have any library functions i find that of the two mpv generally works better for me um although dragon player does have the option to open up a dialog box and grab your file although you have to select the type of file you want to load first and there is no option to say hey pull in any file uh that you might be able to play so a little downside on on that but overall dragon player is pretty good particularly if you're looking for a very quick very quick to load um default option for qt dragon player might be your best bet to go so those are those two the next two players we're going to look at are going to be things that are pretty much available to play absolutely anything and everything even without codex on your system but they don't have any library resources and then we'll get into the library resource ones of course the most popular of all of these is going to be vlc i always install vlc on any system although i don't generally make it my default you have the option to enable or disable network connections which are going to be very beneficial for you going in and determining what it can go on the internet and do and since i don't like internet access on things where possible i tend to disable this it is based on qt but it does have actually some theming options that i've actually never really used before if you go down to customize the interface um you can put things above or below the video you can go with big buttons you can go with flat buttons and then you can actually indicate what is here and what is not uh so you can actually take these guys off um i think you can take them off i didn't have not never played with the customizing options oh i think you can that's what you can do you can drag drag things on and off that's what you can do so you can move things on and off you can put things into the different lines so you can basically go back and forth with the various things that you want you have your timing toolbar here you have your advanced widget and you have a full screen controller see there's a lot of options that you have for customizing the the platform it will play pretty much everything you can open files you can open multiple files you can open a directory you can open a disk on the disk option you have dvd blu-ray audio now i've never tested blu-ray since vlc does come with its own codecs it might actually work so if you're trying to play a blu-ray this is going to be the best place to start but um i don't generally you know i don't actually i don't have any blu-rays nor do i have a blu-ray player i have used the vlc for playing basic dvds it's my go to application for that you can use it for audios or sv zds or vcds you do have options if you want to enter a network url you can do that and you can actually use it for capturing i do find that the capturing and it can also do some transcoding both capturing and transcoding they do not work super well on vlc it's there if you have this and you don't want to install anything else but it's not particularly fun or easy to use for transcoding definitely look at handbrake for streaming look at obs but the they are options that you have inside of your uh playback there's just your basic um you you can do your chapters and titles if your disk supports those not a whole lot other otherwise here but there are a lot of things from playing subtitles the biggest selling point of vlc is that it can play pretty much every type of file and it comes with its own codecs there are no library options although you can throw a bunch of files in here and save a playlist so it's one of the easiest ways when i need to make a playlist that's what i do i dump the songs into there i save as the playlist and then export the playlist that's actually what i found works best for those so this vlc to me is a uh it is a a good video player uh and audio player that i tend to add although i don't use it for everything it's not my default i don't use it a lot it's just it's that good backup that always works in case whatever else i'm doing just doesn't work quite as well now the next one is very similar to vlc this is called sm player and with sm player some people have criticized some of the direction of vlc or some of the bloated nature of vlc so they made something just as bloated called sm player so sm player it pretty much does everything that vlc does it is also qt based um it has its own internal codecs so you don't need to worry about installing codecs and one of the other things this guy here under open you can do file recent files favorites directory playlists you have disks again i have not trusted the blu-ray but it is an option you have vcds audio you can do urls they also have radio and tv which i don't recall seeing in vlc so those are some some options you have additionally it has casting features so they can chromecast to uh they can't cast to a chromecast and it says it can uh cast to a smartphone and tablet i tested that function out with my smartphone it was not able to work part of that could very possibly be just simply due to the fact that um i'm running on a virtual box and my smartphone is uh very locked down so those are contributing factors to why i was not able to get it to work but it's something that if you want to experiment with it's something that at least has the options it is also very easy to use somewhat slow to load as vlc is so i would not generally use it as a as a default but it is going to be good to install particularly if you're not a huge fan of vlc this is going to be your best overall alternative we do have a thumbnail generator if you need to generate some thumbnails you can go ahead and do that inside here and once again there are no specific library options but we do have things like subtitles and um log informations and just other options in here as well so that is the two fi the two systems that we have that have their own internal codecs they can pretty much play anything video or audio they really are for me some some good go-to options now the next players we're going to get into in fact the the whole rest of the list of them are going to be various good and bad systems that can support a library function so this is if you have your own libraries and you would like to do um you just kind of like to listen to those uh the music when you're playing off of your own system or even on some online systems some of these guys are going to work so our first player here among our playlists is going to be audacious audacious is nice in that it's just very text based so if you just need something with simple text base i do find it's a little bit harder to use the libraries also are not automatic which is kind of good for the people that don't like to load up a music player and see that it's skirted through your whole music folder and added everything to it i know that some people do not like the music players that do that it does not do that so when you load this guy up over here and you you hit your search option here then you can see that there's no library here you can tell it where to go you can just kind of click uh select where your location is and then just hit the refresh button and it's going to scan through there now what i don't like about it is the basic organization uh so here we can we can see that i have i have 20 songs under tears for fears i have 10 songs here 10 songs here so it is actually sorting albums and artists but it's kind of a little bit clunkier to use we do have a music option here we have a library option here we can click the basically the sort by functions but it's actually a little bit harder and a little bit clunkier to use i'm not a huge fan of this one it does pull in libraries like library art from online you don't really have a choice of the matter it just kind of does it all on its own so you might like that you might not like that it is somewhat easy to use although i do find the library functions a little bit clunky so here is the best selling point of this application is if you go down under your um i think it's under your settings under file settings you can see it is based on gtk but this one also has winamp classic interfaces so you can actually choose to go with a variety of win amps now i don't know if you can install new win amp files i know it's possible now to download uh the whole spectrum of win amp skins and themes i'm not sure if you can they do have a number they have the classic 2x the 1.3 the default 2x they have the ivory osmosis refugee tiny player so these are the options that they have let me go ahead and just play something just so you can kind of see i like this one of the ones that they give us but these are the skins that they have you can see what they look like playing there so this one is the only one that has these options and if you close out all the library stuff you can do this and make it really small if you want so if you just want a little bar you can do that and if you need the settings options or if you need to convert it back to gtk you can just go ahead and do this so that's the biggest selling point of this one is if you are an old classic guy and you love that old win amp style this gives you the win amp themes and styles it's again fairly easy to use you can search through your library and things like that so it's not bad it's honestly just not my favorite particularly if you like the album art you have to hover over something to see what the album art is and even that's pretty small you don't have any other artist information or things like that that might be exactly what you want but regardless now this one it will close as soon as you hit the close button so it's not going to continue to play so if you do like things that minimize to the system tray then it's probably not going to be your your best bet now the next one is going to be clementine and there's also a fork called strawberry that is very similar and i could not tell you the difference between the two just so you guys know there is a fork of clementine called strawberry that is big enough to be in in arch repositories and some other ones although i did not see it in the zorin repositories here as well clementine is very nice in that it can play a variety of different things we have the search option which will search a variety of different things we have the library options i do find the library options here are a whole lot better than the library options that we found on audacious and that you can see they're they're nice and uh nice and organized here i can pull down the artist let me find an artist i think i have a couple inner tiers for fears you'll notice though that i had spelled the tears for fears wrong on one of them so this separates out by two library options there is actually one of the music players that recognizes this simple typo and fixes it but most of them do not so here though i can just go ahead and pull up an individual album i can play it and then the other options that we have inside of this we can pull in other options as far as the library is concerned you do have full control over the libraries so you can tell it it does not automatically populate the library with your music folder what you can do is you can just go ahead and add you can add new libraries new folders to the library let me find that function for you real quick okay so it's going to be under tools and preferences under music library you can see that you can add a variety of different folders so if you want to add a variety different folders you can do that you can also remove individual folders and then you can monitor the library for changes which is a default option you can monitor the library when it starts and then i don't know of any specific way if you can remove something directly other than let's just right click and see if you can delete from disk i don't see the option just removed from the library maybe it's there and i just don't see it though but you could move it out of that library folder so you don't have those specific options we have some nice visualizations those have a lot of different plugins that are available you can go online here and you can see we have spotify you have various radio stations there's one drive there's podcasts dropbox google drive there's just so many options that you have inside of this making clementine a very nice player additionally the default option is if you close it it's going to continue to play in your system tray now here on zorin this is the only music player that actually gave me a system tray icon maybe that's just the fact that we're on gnome and zorin and gnome is a little spotty with system tray icons this is the only one that has the icon although we'd have to check some other distributions to see what it has as far as as other options inside of here it is going to go online and grab your options so you do have the ability to disable network remote connections and it does support streams cds playlists it is qt based as well and it can grab you song and artist information from online in fact let me go ahead and show you that over here here is song information so you can see the last fm here's the lyrics from lyrics.com so you can actually get you your lyrics and then over here you can actually get artist information so it gives you the biography the history just a lot of different stuff from whatever artist is currently playing so that's actually a really nice option for those that really like those extra easter eggs or you want to know a little bit more about your music so there you go clementine and strawberry are definitely awesome choices so let me go ahead and close clementine out from the system tray and then we will move on to the next one that we are talking about and that's going to be gnome music of all the players that we have i pretty much hate gnome music the most why is that well the biggest problem i have with no music is that it generally it there's a lot of issues with it as far as gnome is taking this philosophy that is so user friendly they've removed all ability for you to do anything i don't have the ability to go in and say where my music library is it's just like oh it's in a music folder let's add this to the library yay and so here is what it looks like um obviously no music is based on gtk duh because you know gtk is no basically it's going to automatically import your music and you have no control i would even figure hey maybe i can collect click this guy here and delete no you can't you can add it to a playlist but you can't actually delete anything on there if you uh if you click your uh your select function it can create a playlist with the select function no library management at all that's kind of the downside the really upsides it has it is good looking and has easy layout options if i want to sort by albums i can do that if i want to sort by artists i can do that once again you can see it does not want my tears or fears together most of them do not i will show you the one that does eventually i do like the layout though the layout is very very easy to use here's your song layout if you play a song um now this one is going to continue to play when you hit the close button and and i forget exactly how to even stop so uh that is uh that is either a positive or a negative of course here on gnome there's no icon for it and so i would have to get in there and um i'd have to get in there and figure that out so you can there is no stop button there's a pause button so presumably if you just pause it and close it good enough you can see that they have an option over here you can log into a last fm account in theory i'm guessing this is working if you're using your online accounts maybe there's an about a keyboard shortcuts and a help and that is it that is all we have so not overall the best but at least it looks nice and it functions easy it's easy to use and it's going to work flawlessly with gnome being is that it is specifically written for gnome now if you want a better music player for gnome than the default that many distributions ship with is going to be rhythm box rhythm box i have a love hate relationship with it it does automatically it is based on gtk it is for gnome it does automatically import all of your music libraries from your music folder in but unlike no music you actually have the ability to control that library so if we come in over here and we pull this guy down and look under i believe it's under our preferences you can see you can tell it where to search your your library so we can't add multiple like we can in clementine but we can actually tell it to look in a different place you can watch it for new files to automatically do things we do have library structure where we can do artist artist artist album artist album you know so there's a lot of different options that you have you can indicate what the file name is you can talk about the preferred formats and things like that so that is one of the the good things is it does have a library that while it's not my favorite it actually is easy to use it's all text based we have artists over here we have albums over on the other side but once you start playing something it'll give you the album art here you can hover over it to see what the album looks like there now the biggest reasons i keep rhythm box on my platforms as i do like listening to some podcasts and you actually can come in here you can add a podcast and this is going to you can actually go in there and you can either paste in the specific feed or you can search for a podcast so if there's a podcast that has a specific feed you can go ahead and do that and if it does not have a specific feed then you can at least search for something so um let's see if we can find is joe rogan as okay uh i'm guessing joe rogan might be available yeah there you go um spirituality really okay um i don't know maybe i spelled joe rogan wrong but anyway uh that's not one i listened to but you can see that you can search this and if i remember correctly the search function goes through itunes is what it says oh itunes and miro guide or you can actually enter a podcast feed and then it's going to automatically download things and if you saw the options in the preferences for podcasts this is going to tell you where exactly it's going to download those podcasts into so that's actually a really nice option we do have last fm libre fm we have radio options in here as well so if you like to listen to radios rhythm box does have those options in there for you overall not my favorite for listening to my library i actually don't like how it organizes the libraries but you also have to understand that my old favorite classic was overall was windows media player um don't hate me that much for blasphemy on linux i loved banshee unfortunately it is no more so i had to go out and do a search for another music player and so that leads me to the music player that i like the most of all of the music players that i have found now it still does not quite replace my banshee but is is about as best that i have found and that is lollipop lollipop is also based on gtk so you're going to have uh it's going to you know integrate best with a gnome platform what i love about this is just the ability to customize it how everything is sorted out and by the way this is the one music player that did fix my typo in tears for fears so it does recognize that these these are the same artists so it only shows me one link to artists rather than two tears or fears links and so i love how smart the library is it's going to fix that simple misspelling we do have inside of our library options we actually have options to have multiple different players and then the simple reset database for music database resections resections and making up new words uh database resets here so if it's completely messed something up you can just add your new folder reset the database it's going to clear everything and then search for whatever options you have you can have multiple folders in there so for people that want to have multiple different music folders organized you can do that the other options in the preferences are amazing web you can enable or completely disable it as a privacy guy i love the option to automatically completely disable all network access but if you do want to use network stuff we have last fm libre fm spotify audio fan art itunes deezer youtube google and then there's wikipedia.go musicbrainz there's so many options that we have inside here if you do want to allow network you can auto update music you can continue playback when it is closed although again i don't get the system icon here in zorin but you can toggle that on or off so if you like that function you can turn it on if you don't like that function you can turn it off you can restore state on startup you can do playlists and a variety of different things as far as your appearance you can use dark theme variants if available there's compilations and you can show or hide arbum album artwork and you can actually go with the album cover size so there's so many neat options that we have as far as the layouts there are suggestions now you can see i do not like these online suggestions this is actually triggered by the fact that you turned on your online networks so if you do not want to see these you think this is a little creepy then you actually have the option to turn that off just by turning that off in the network settings here's popular albums i haven't set any you can do albums random albums recently added you can go into individual albums here and then the layout is very nice we have the album layout we have other albums by this artist and then our songs are nice and logically listed out here we can go online it says no items there because i've not actually logged into any accounts there is a place to log into the accounts in here here's compilations here's just your individual artists you can also do your artists as a list and these are options i'll show you how you can add these on here's genres playlists uh anything playing in here as a search function now you can customize this bar over there um with these three dots down here at the bottom so over here if you don't like genres i don't care for genres i don't keep my genres up to date i don't necessarily need the album artist list don't need that i found lyrics did not seem to work i probably don't need the search function i definitely don't want to see your suggestions again and i don't really need that either so now um [Music] now i can completely customize what my layout looks like this is basically all i need this is why i like lollipop the most so it has the best overall layout with the best options for layout we can adjust the sizes of the folders that we have it's very easy to use everything in lollipop works great and so really that is why i went with that one as my go-to choice i have it installed on my writing computer for when i'm writing and want to listen to something soft in the background i have that going and then i'll put that on other computers where i actually want to have a media player where i can't have banshee anymore but anyway that being said lollipop is one of my favorite but hopefully this video gave you a good place to go to for just a lot of different music players so you can go ahead and see what's out there experiment with them and find the best music player for your particular way of interacting with music on your linux computer so thanks for watching guys let me know if you like this format if you like this type of research and software comparisons and we can probably do more of them in the future thanks for watching leave some comments down below subscribe to the channel if you have not already and we will see you next time thank you for watching this video from switched to linux this channel would not be possible without the backing of the program supporters scrolling on the screen now you can be a supporter at patreon at patreon.com t-o-m-m or at thinklifemedia.com i also want to thank the open source community who creates such excellent software that makes producing this show possible please remember to support your software communities thank you and i hope that you enjoy switching to linux

Channel: Switched to Linux

Views: 4,412

Keywords: Switched to Linux, Technology, Privacy, Linux

Id: QQ5wMhRXEOM

Length: 34min 8sec (2048 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021