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The state of Linux music players in 2026
(crescentro.se)
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this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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Quodlibet is the one with all the features.
I absolutely adore being able to click into and between genres and artists to get to albums and songs instantly. I want to ultimately move back to MPD, maybe Navidrome or Subsonic, but... I just love Quod Libet.
this looks like foobar2k, cool
I love that it has proper search queries: https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/searching.html
Do other players have this as well?
And the queries work with custom tags, which can also be added to any element of the UI. It's so good if you're ADHD about organization.
I love how I can type things like #(added < 1 week) to search for albums I recently added to my library.
Agreed. It is my player of choice, though being it is pure Python, it uses a lot of resources for a music player. If I was tight on ram or using a slower CPU, I'd probably go with something leaner.
What a strange take. When I first switched to Linux in ~2009 I tried a ton of other players. Weirdly, Quod Libet was the only performant option back then. Amarok, Rhythmbox, Banshee, Clementine, etc all chugged to load my library with their UIs freezing for upwards of half an hour before I had something usable. Quod Libet just worked.
Right now it's using 598MB with a music library of ~31K songs.
Mine is running at 1.2GB of ram, but I have... a substantial library
I did cut back significantly since that initial switch. At one point, I had 1TB of music. Right now it's sitting at ~210MB of mp3s. Quod Libet uses less RAM than Firefox, Thunderbird, or RSSHub, but it is sitting at 4th place on my system.
I don't think there's a way to scale music libraries to these obscene sizes without impacting RAM. Unless you manage it strictly with a file manager and open album folders individually with a lightweight player used only for playback.
I agree that a large library will always heavily increase the ram usage, but Quod Libet is just less efficient in this regard than some others. I still use it as I like it best and it has done the best at filling the niche that foobar2000 did for me in Windows (minus the insane UI customization ability). Being in Python also makes it super easy to extend. It isn't even close to 4th on my system in memory consumption, but my PC does triple duty as it is my dev workstation, media server, and personal PC. I'm actually shocked that RSSHub uses so much! Is that also a case of a large "library" of sorts?
nodejs + thousands of feeds processed every hour, so I'm gonna go with yes
Firefox is for opening links that appear in Thunderbird with my current workflow, RSSHub generates the vast majority of them
i've always been a "organize everything at the file system level, and just play folders on demand in winamp" type guy... so when i couldn't find a good winamp replacement after switching to linux, i ended up on quod libet and got used to organizing everything via tagging
quod libet was a bit overwhelming at first and forced me to fix a lot of broken tags, but totally worth it.