Hi, apologies for yet another “help me replace my Windows app 😭” post. I am attempting to move to Linux and have been mostly successful - day-to-day stuff, programming, games, it all works great! The biggest deal-breaker so far has actually been a music player… Is there anything that comes even close to MusicBee? I have yet to find it and am surprised there is such a gap in the space considering Linux seems full of data hoarders and collectors. Before you ask, I have tried running MusicBee through Wine but I just don’t think it will work - Everything is 3x slower than in Windows, there are little bugs everywhere, pressing the wrong dialogue may crash the program, and some pages just don’t load… So! Let’s get into my pipe-dream of what I would want to keep from MusicBee:
Must-haves (deal-breakers):
- Multiple artist tags!!! All my files have artists tagged separately, with a display artist tagged separate. I can change the internal tags I use, but I can’t go without any form of multi-artist support.
- Browsing and searching by various tags, such as Album Artist and Genre.
- Support for volume levelled (replay gain) playback.
Features that I feel I need:
- Scrobbling.
- Auto playlists that support any combination of tags and preferrably allow referencing other playlists.
- Registering external tools to send files to via shortcuts or context menus, to supplement the features that I inevitably will miss.
Nice-to-haves (could be replaced with another app or script or by re-organising my library):
- Tag editor
- Support for custom tags.
- Conversion to other file types including playlist re-labelling.
- File moving and re-organisation based on user-customisable formats, i.e
<Album Artist>/<Album>/<Title>. - Tagging of volume levelling (replay gain).
Yeah, I don’t think it’s happening either. But I figure I should ask before I just give up. Web apps would be fine too, btw! If you’re wondering why I want custom tag support, it’s because: I’ve found it much easier to use for auto-playlist creation, and I have found it more resistant to data loss and file moves since I don’t have to rely on the music players internal library. It could be replaced by transferring that data into the Comments or Keywords tag, but that still requires very strong auto playlist support.
So my question is this:
Are there any Linux-native music players that fit some of these criteria? If not, what is your favourite that comes close? And as an additional question, if you were to extend an open source player to support any of these features, which do you think would be the best basis to build upon?
Beets for cleaning up the tags and self-hosted navidrome appears to support multiple artist tags. The web interface of navidrome definitely supports filtering by both albumartist and artist (the latter will include albums and tracks with multiple artists). I assume this is what you are trying to achieve by using a visual artist tag? If you just want to rename an artist but keep the underlying artist tag, that can probably also be achieved with beets.
This link shows the details of how navidrome handles tagging: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/usage/library/tagging/ The issue if you don’t want to use the navidrome web interface is that not all clients support browsing by artist I suspect (and often use albumartist, which I personally prefer). I use supersonic which I doesn’t appear to support it, but there’s also Feishin and a bunch of mobile clients you could use (or open a feature request on supersonic github).
Replaygain will be supported by most clients (not sure about the navidrome web interface).
Great recommendation on Feishin. Navidrome alone works for most of what I want as it does respect multiple artist tags, but the default web UI is subjectively bad and lacks any way to add smart playlists. Feishin solves both of those issues. I’ll be testing this further, it may just solve my browsing problems! I knew about Beets from a long time ago but never checked it out, I’ll have to see how that goes for my back-end needs. I have a feeling the disconnect between front-end and back-end will likely annoy me for a while as I try adding new files, but we’ll see.
The display artist (a MusicBee-specific feature) is just an easy way to keep multiple artists in the artist tag while retaining a nice readable tag. For instance that artist tag would be
Apashe; Wasiubut the display would beApashe feat. Wasiu. MusicBrainz does something similar but usesartistsinstead ofartistandartistinstead ofdisplayartist. Feishin displays the raw data nice enough I don’t mind losing the display though (it’s all in the tags anyway, no actual data loss there).Also a little fun thing about Navidrome, when checking the community packages entry: https://www.navidrome.org/docs/installation/packages/
There’s a package for Termux, which is a terminal emulator for Android. Navidrome is in its official repo.
So it’s pretty simple to run Navidrome directly on a phone too. I’ve been doing that for a while now. Also, Navidrome now finally has CLI user management.
Not relevant, you can stop reading here.
When I forgot my admin password in the past and I didn’t want to reset everything, I had to do a weird thing. I utilized the External Authentication (formerly called Reverse Proxy Authentication) to login into the admin account. I did so with
proxy_set_header Remote-User "admin"in NGINX config (yes, still on a phone, in Termux) to get automatically logged in. But even then, I couldn’t change admin password without the old password… but I could change regular users’ and also create another admin account. So I did, removed the proxy auth, logged into admin2, changed admin to regular user, set the password, changed it back to admin and then from it deleted admin2.