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 10^4^ magnitude library size.
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)
It doesn't look to be open source, or is it?
Haha, yeah I just updated my answer a second ago after realizing this was c/foss and not c/technology.
No problem. When I decided to look for myself, it seems this question has come up on their forum, and the dev gets really salty over it ๐
Looks like good software, though. ๐