quod libet

source docs features screenshots

Used ~500MB Ram with a pile of plugins, and 1.5% CPU, as of the end of my testing. Did not test resources on first launch.

Lightweight, simple, fast interface. A lot of plugins come pre-installed. Audio-fingerprint based tagging does a reasonable first-pass for tagging. Supports rewriting filenames based on tags. Supports regex in most search fields.

The interface, though simple, is sometimes a bit disorganized. For example, shuffle and loop are on the bottom bar of the player, that is otherwise unused except those buttons. There are ten different interfaces that have a lot of overlap. These can be further modified with plugins.

Editing tags is easy enough, but cannot be done directly from the main window, and a second window has to open. Advanced tag editing with regex is possible. If a group of tags are hilighted, you will see (Tag FooBar (All except 3 songs)), making it easy to correct a few stragglers.

Audio Features: Equalizer, Compressor, downmixer (stereo to mono). A horrible karaoke mode.

Has a plethora of interfaces for control. DBUS, MQTT, MPD Server.

MPD server is barebones and does not support streaming, library management, or playlists. Only shows current track, volume, and track control. Shuffle and loop are also supported.

Outputs JEP-118 (Jabber user tunes file), and several instant messengers.

Many themes, dark theme worked without configuration.

Internet radio browser with many stations built in.

Supports manually added podcast RSS "Audio Feeds". Only supports streaming, no download (as far as I can tell?).

Supports building a queue while on shuffle (some songs ordered, then back to shuffle).

Can export a playlist as a folder full of files, m3u/pls, or HTML.

Automatic rating songs based on plays/skips. Supports weighted playback based on ratings, last time played, last time album/artist played, repeat penalties, etc. Powerful shuffle engine.

Several times it reported the wrong song was playing, or a different song than I clicked would play, but it showed the correct song in the player.

Supports running custom commands (in batch or on play) on songs based on their tags.

Plugins to show/sync lyrics, but no way to download them (that I can see, I do not rule out that one of the many tag plugins will do this).

Alarm clock and lullaby (fade out/sleep mode).

Internet radio .pls and .m3u files are not detected by library scanner. The stream links can be manually added from the 'Internet Radio' View, however saved files cannot be opened directly by the player. Internet radio cannot be added to the queue to play after local files.

Has inotify-based library watcher.

Notifications come with MPD server.

Based on some plugin and view text, some of the magic comes from saved playlists. I have not tested this.

Supports visualisations with projectM (milkdrop compatible)

Adds ratings and listen counts to file metadata.

Many more features available in plugins that remain untested.

rhythmbox

source homepage screenshots plugins

Resources: 250MB RAM, ~1.5% cpu. By the end of testing, resources climbed to ~300MB.

Small, light, fast. Simple interface. Happy using less space.

Supports "replaygain" to provide consistent volume. Untested.

Supports MTP devices.

Supports "DAAP" to share and play music over the network. Untested.

Automatically added and imported /home/$USER/Music. Set library to the correct location, but can't figure out how to unimport this, or make it rescan now that it's updated. Update, Just select all then click "remove". After doing this, you can click import and it will scan your new library.

Preferences has a checkbox to monitor library.

notifications include album art and play/pause/next/previous controls.

Metadata editing is stupid simple. A popup window opens that gives you editable fields. No advanced features, but several can be edited at once. Ostensibly has a lyrics search, but I haven't had any success returning lyrics.

Shuffle isn't a 'mode', but a button that shuffles your current queue, then plays linearly. This means no undoing, but you can also reorder it as you like, or add to it.

Internet radio .pls and .m3u files are not detected by library scanner. The stream links can be manually added from the 'Internet Radio' View, however saved files cannot be opened directly by the player. Internet radio cannot be added to the queue to play after local files.

Supports searching for podcasts directly from fapple podcasts. Subscribing to them doesn't seem to work. Manually adding them doesn't work either. The corner says "0 episodes" with a spinning circle, so maybe it'll work, but for now I can't even see evidence that tehy were subscribed to.

Update several minutes later: The podcasts are now in teh interface, but show no episodes.

Defaulted to match system dark mode.

There are several plugins that provide things like web control and other assorted features.

strawberry

source code screenshots documentation/wiki homepage

Resource Use: 240MB Ram, 4.5% CPU. While looking at htop, cpu bumped up to 8-30%, ram was at >400MB, and then it dropped to 177MB. Back to 390MB. IDK MY BFF JILL. Pretty consistently sitting at 383MB now.

Interface is busy. Substantial right-click menu. Not super happy without being full-screen when fractional scaling.

Supports "Skip this track" in playlists. I don't understand how queues work? I can add to queue but not play from it? I don't understand how to shuffle. I can shuffle the playlist, but it plays in the original order.

Based on 'source' Column showing a disk for local files. Supports mixed sources for a playlist or queue, probably (untested).

SomaFM out of the box? I didn't see it originally, but added a single .pls from their webstie and somafm populated in the radio section with all (or most of) their stations. Maybe it took a minute to load them or maybe it discovered from my downloaded .pls file /shrug

Adds ratings and listen counts to file metadata.

Supports subsonic

Library scan does not detect internet radio playlists. When added manually, playlists can be added to a regular queue.

Supports organizing files based on tags.

Has many smart playlists out of the box, and supports making more with a simple wizard (what is this 1998?)/builder.

Reliably found (mostly) and displayed lyrics. No way to automatically put those in tags. Could just copy/paste them, I guess.

Supports external media hardware/MTP. Supports transcoding.

No dark mode RIP my eyes.