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.

  • LazyDaisy (she/her)
    9•3 months 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)

    • @jrgd@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      3•3 months ago

      Just took a couple minutes to install and setup the fork to try it out. Turns out there is a flatpak on Flathub under the id dog.unix.cantata.Cantata that looks to be maintained directly by nullobsi. I’ll have to see where rough edges show up, but this fork looks good thus far. A full port from Qt5 -> Qt6 isn’t a trivial amount of effort, so mad respect to everyone working on this ported version.