Greetings,

For several years, I have used the wonderful Cantata as a frontend to MPD. Sadly, the frontend stopped receiving updates in 2022 and has started to some problems with age. While I continue to use Cantata for as long as I can, I have been looking around at other music players. However, I haven’t seen anything that aims to implement some of the nice things from Cantata.

In short, a few things I have been looking for in a player:

  • suitable for playing single songs, albums, full artists, custom mixes, or playlists (no hyperfocus)
  • can either set a custom artist sort tag (albumartist, composer, etc.) or properly handle semicolons (or some other separator char) in tags
  • semicolon tag split in general would be nice for genre handling
  • powerful active queue handling (move; shuffle and sort by song, album, artist; remove duplicates; consume on play; etc)
  • online lyrics search from multiple providers

Additionally, some nice-to-haves that Cantata handles:

  • CD ripping
  • export library to portable device (with compatibility)

Anyone have a favorite that can handle at least the shortlist of functionality I come to expect? I don’t expect specifically a frontend for MPD, but I would prefer a player that doesn’t struggle to handle a library with 104 magnitude library size.

  • spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org
    1·
    3 hours ago

    it might be more complicated than you’re looking for (requires a self-hosted server instead of just a desktop app), but take a look at the ecosystem surrounding Subsonic

    Subsonic did some licensing shenanigans, but there’s an actively-maintained GPL3 fork called airsonic-advanced

    there’s also alternate implementations, Gonic and Navidrome, that maintain compatibility with the original Subsonic API

    because they all work with a common API, there’s a variety of clients that can work with the backend.

    I’m also a big fan of Beets for music organization, it’s not tied in to the Subsonic ecosystem so you can use them completely separately if you want. it handles tagging, can fetch lyrics, and can also transcode the library (or an arbitrary subset of it) if you want to send it to a portable device. (not sure if this is what you mean by compatibility)

    I currently have Beets organizing everything, run Navidrome on my server pointed at the Beets library directory, then Ultrasonic on my phone, and the Navidrome web interface on my desktop. the combo is especially nice for streaming to my phone - Navidrome will transcode FLAC to Opus on the fly, and Ultrasonic has an option to cache those files locally, and to pre-download them over wifi instead of mobile data. so I have my full collection available on my phone, can stream it from anywhere, and the songs I listen to frequently are already downloaded and I don’t have to waste mobile data, or wait for them to load if I have poor cell signal.

  • leopold@lemmy.kde.social
    1·
    5 hours ago

    What operating system do you use? On Linux I use Amarok which is great, but afaik there’s no up-to-date versions of it for other operating systems. It should have everything you want dunno about some of these tho like the semicolon stuff. Strawberry is a similar player that works on other operating systems.

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
    1·
    5 hours ago

    Check out MusicBee. It’s my go-to for Windows now, and it has most if not all the things you asked for.

    (Note: upon looking into it, MB is not OSS, if that is a deal-breaker for you)

      • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
        2·
        5 hours ago

        Haha, yeah I just updated my answer a second ago after realizing this was c/foss and not c/technology.

        • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
          2·
          4 hours ago

          No problem. When I decided to look for myself, it seems this question has come up on their forum, and the dev gets really salty over it 😂

          Looks like good software, though. 👍

  • LazyDaisy (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    7·
    13 hours ago

    first of all, there appears to be a fork of Cantata (which is still my music player of choice as well) that is still getting updates (maintained by a one nullobsi), if you’re on Arch, it’s available on the AUR as cantata-qt6
    my current fallback option for local music playback is fooyin, I don’t know for certain whether it checks all of your boxes at the moment, but it is still very much in active development
    I also use jellyfinmediaplayer for music on my jellyfin server, but that doesn’t have lyric support (unfortunately)