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?