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.

  • leopold@lemmy.kde.social
    1·
    13 minutes 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·
    27 minutes 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)

  • LazyDaisy (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    6·
    9 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)