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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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I've been using Audacious for years now; it's lightweight and also has no library management but I find I don't really need that. I just point it to any one album on my drive and it plays it.
I have each album saved as a separate 'playlist' which works well for me. I can see people being annoyed with how I have it set up, but I like it this way.
That's the point for me for Audacious. I don't want to dig through my entire 30+ GB music folder, create a massive index or whatever, load all that shit to memory every time I open the fucking program, just to play one album.
"Oh I want this album"> Drag it in
"Oh I want this discography" > drag it in
The only problem is no multi column tab view, and no drag into empty space/designated zone to create a new playlist.
Audacious is the only one I've tried and works perfect for me. Load up my whole library and shuffle!
Audacious isn't perfect, but it's far better than the others that I tried. Had been using VLC forever in WIndows, but for whatever reason I kept running into issues that I couldn't resolve, so began a search for alternatives.
The only huge issue I have is when I add more songs to my music directory, I can't refresh the existing playlist. I have to delete and add the directory again. Don't do it a lot, so it's more inconvenience, and everything else works so much better than other alternatives did.
Audacious has a Winamp skin, that's enough for me.