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What's your audio player?

Andy Zhao (he/him) on February 11, 2020

When I switched from Windows to Mac to learn code, I missed using the audio player I had. It was a small app called Billy (https://www.sheepfriends...
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Austin S. Hemmelgarn

I generally use VLC (videolan.org/vlc/). In short:

  • It runs on everything I care about (and quite a few things I don't).
  • It offers a great deal of configuration, but doesn't need any manual changes to the config in most cases (that is, it usually Just Works, but you can usually fix it easily when it doesn't).
  • It does videos too, so I don't need extra software for the rare cases I'm watching local media on my computer.
  • Unlike most other media players, almost everything is optional at compile time, which is bit for me since I use Gentoo as my main OS.
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Saurabh Sharma

+1

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Tomek Buszewski

I use Qobuz for streaming, and Vox for, well, streaming, from Vox Cloud. Spotify for things that either aren't on Qobuz, but this is rare.

I remember using Poweramp back in the Android and mp3 days. Man, it was so weird, it was the only decent player that didn't add any gaps.

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Andy Zhao (he/him)

Exactly! I think Poweramp has continued development but it doesn't work well on my latest phone (Motorola Moto G), which is a shame.

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Tomek Buszewski

I think today local file players are a niché, thank to streaming services like Spotify. 10 years back I remember Foobar 2000, Winamp and all these players that could play my collection. Couple of years ago, when I was trying to rekindle my love for some Polish band and listen to their music from a hard drive, I couldn't find a decent player for Mac (Vox is okay, but I found it late).

Also, fun fact: I remember Winamp being the music player. Now it's discontinued for years.

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Jakob Christensen • Edited

Yes, Winamp was leader of the pack back in the day. I think it is still alive though? winamp.com

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Tomek Buszewski

I had the old info, Winamp was acquired by some other company and is, in fact, alive. Sorry for misinformation.

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Ben Halpern

Audio player

I use Spotify/Tidal mostly 😄 (And Quicktime to answer the actual question)

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Andy Zhao (he/him)

I forgot I'm in the minority as someone who doesn't stream music 😅

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Glenn Carremans

I don't have any music/audio files anymore on any of my devices, I started using Spotify (premium) 3-4 years ago and never looked back. I really like that it continues playing in the same genre/style after the playlist or song has finished and the weekly album with suggestions based on what I have listened before.

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Will G

Can we get some love for command line players? For example cmus and I also recommend mps-youtube for easy youtube listening from your terminal. For the macOS folks out there if you liked Winamp this player is pretty cool :) github.com/maculateConception/aura...

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OnFileNotWanted • Edited

check out open cubic player ,after mpd && ncmpcpp its truly a tihng of beauty in CLI
cirrusuk.wordpress.com/2014/03/22/...

[]

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Transient

I tend to stream Spotify (or less frequently, YouTube) while developing or doing college work now, simply for the recommendations. Any other time I use Google Play Music as I have a huge library on it. The only reason I avoid GPM while working is because I don't like to keep switching tracks and changing up my playlist order to avoid distracting songs. Occasionally I'll use AIMP for anything I'd like to hear in FLAC, but that's often when I'm not doing much else, or if I already have it open.

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Andy Zhao (he/him)

So there was Billy, which was all I really needed. I liked that it was lightweight and just worked. Never crashed and didn't have a bloated UI -- probably brutalist by today's standards.

Now I use Vox since I refuse to use iTunes. I'm not a huge music person though and I'm just too lazy to upgrade (unless someone suggests a better one 😁).

Oh, and on my Android phone I use Google Play Music, and used to use Poweramp. It was a bit buggy on my phone though so I just went with the stock app.

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Ben Sinclair

At home I used to use mpc to connect to a box under the sofa.

At work I play specific things through Google Play Music or Bandcamp.

I use soma.fm's web-player, too, though I used to use some tray streaming app I can't remember.

Last, I use reddit.musicplayer.io to play tracks from various Reddit subs. This is a really great piece of work. It's open-source and has some bugs I'd like to help fix sometime, but you know how it is...

In short, I don't use an app, all my music/talk is done through the browser these days.

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Michael Tintiuc

music players is a struggle for me, I've tried Rhythmbox, Lollypop, Amarok and a bunch of others, but Clementine seems to be the most flexible and with at least somewhat pleasant UI without being limiting.

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Michael Tharrington

I'm a big fan of Winamp.

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Andy Zhao (he/him)

I never got into Winamp; what do you like about it?

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Michael Tharrington

It's lightweight (well compared to iTunes at least), I like the variety of themes, and it holds a special place in my heart because it's the first software I ever used for playing music (back in the Napster days when I was in middle school) ... I also quite dig the minimalistic, old school look of it sans theming.

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Raheel Khan

I use MediaMonkey for music and Foobar 2000 for podcasts. I add notes to the comment tags for podcasts and Foobar lets me see them in the main playlist interface. Also the global hotkeys make it easy to pause/skip back and forward without switching to the app.

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OnFileNotWanted • Edited

Im a big fan of MPD musicpd.org , clicking the image will take you my always on 24/7 MPD instance running on an old raspberry pi model B the audio is mostly tech talks etc.

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Tyler V. (he/him)

Until Google pries it from my hands, I'll continue using Google Play Music - I just love it so much and am not looking forward to the swap to Youtube Music.

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Andy Zhao (he/him)

They integrated Google Play Music with Maps recently too which is a nice plus!

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David Farrell

I use SoundCloud as my music source of choice.

For a long time, I used SoundMate (non-free) which brings soundCloud as a native app to the Mac.

I tend to get stuck in my ways and forget to checkout alternatives once I settle on something.

However, whenever I get a new macbook, I use it as a fresh start to re-evaluate configurations, processes, tools, etc.

With my last update, I decided to try a fresh search for native sound cloud support. This time I discovered SoundCleod which is 1) free and 2) A little bit better in some ways than SoundMate.

SoundCleod hasn't had a new release in awhile, but the latest stable release is working fine for me so far.

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Thorsten Hirsch

Rhythmbox@Linux and Music@macOS using daap to access my music library served with forked-daapd

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Peter Kim Frank

VLC or Quicktime for opening 1-off files.

I use Spotify or a browser-based player (Hype Machine, YouTube, etc) about 99% of the time, though.

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giftedstan

Rythmbox on Ubuntu 😍

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Dian Fay

ncmpcpp with mpd.

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Sathyasarathi

Any clementine lovers here?

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Binyamin Green

On Ubuntu & derivatives, I use Lollypop

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Stephanie Handsteiner

I mostly stream my music using Spotify (or less frequently on YouTube) while working or learning.

If it's not on Spotify or YouTube I'll use QuickTime Player.

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🌌 Sébastien Feugère ☔

For some reason, I almost only listen to music from my phone with Vanilla Music, and podcasts with Antena Pod. Otherwise I use vynils.

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Mat Borowiak

I'm using Spotify for many years now and it's simply amazing. I need nothing more than this.

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Daniel Madalitso Phiri

I use Spotify 90% of the time. VLC really works well for local files though

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Lautaro Lobo

Spotify and VLC. Both great (bah, Spotify if is not premium is total crap).

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Ivan Šimičić

I mostly use Spotify (and sometimes, YouTube) these days but IINA is my go to media player on macOS, and VLC on Linux/Windows.

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Ghost

videos? mpv, music? mpv, YT videos? mpv!... if it sounds or moves, mpv