August 22, 2025
This started as part of my minor gripes about Linux, but that was getting wordy, and this section was a lot more ranty. Because hoooooooly shit the music library/player situation on Linux is dire.
I've tried three different players, and the best I can say is that one of them isn't terrible.
Mint Linux comes with Music. (Such naming, much searchability. Wow.) It doesn't work at all. It starts with a screen that says "the contents of your Music [f]older will appear here", and provides a button that opens the file browser to ~/Music. Which very helpfully shows all the folders than my MP3s live in already. But Music never gets off that screen.
I looked before and tried mucking about with the indexing service (or whatever Linux calls it) -- no change. So either Music just straight is broken, or it can't enumerate subfolders... meaning it's broken. And that's the player that ships with the OS. Or maybe the first one that comes up when you search the package manager. I can't remember now. Either way, it's option one and it's broken.
The next one I tried was Rhythmbox. At a first glance it's ugly, in the 90s "GUIs are affectations for losers" sense. It shows album art... as a postage stamp for the currently playing song. Everything else is lists of text.
It also organizes by the artist tag in each MP3, meaning that multi-artist albums like movie soundtracks are scattered to the winds. I'm pretty sure there's a way to fix that, but not in the UI. At least not that I can see anywhere. Which makes it kinda useless for the way I listen to music. Which is by album, which I assume is how everyone who's not using playlists does, but I'm just some weirdo Gen Xer so what do I know.
And to top it all off: When you close the window it keeps playing! Yep, no way to control the playback any more, but it's just gonna steam right along like nothing happened. Who in the history of humanity has ever wanted this? If I want the window to go away but keep the program running, that's what the minimize button is for. Closing the window means "go the fuck away, I'm done with you". The fact that you can't even turn this misfeature off is mind-boggling to me. Yeah, this one is trash.
Lastly there's the one I use almost every day -- Gapless -- which I can at least say I don't hate. It even shows the album art... sometimes. That might be on me, though. For a lot of files I used iTunes's "find album art" function on my old PC, and that may have done something iTunes-y instead of putting the images in the MP3 files like I'd have expected. In other cases I found the artwork directly because iTunes couldn't and put it in the file info myself. Maybe that accounts for the difference. It's hard to tell, for the same reason as my next issue.
It also splits albums into twins of themselves sometimes for reasons I haven't figured out yet. My best guess is that it's looking at a handful of ID3 tags to determine what an "album" is, and one of those fields (like maybe year?) doesn't match. Which wouldn't be a problem, except...
This program has no way to edit the ID3 tags. Apparently the only way to edit ID3 tags on Linux, in the year two thousand and twenty-five of the Common Era, is with a command-line tool. The program you're already using to play those files back to you? Can't do it. Why not? Fuck you, that's why. At least I can take a look at the tags, even if I can't edit them. So it's got that going for it at least.
As a bit of UI weirdness, if I'm on the last track of an album the "next track" button is disabled even though it knows what song to play next. Not sure why it's set up that way and not just wired to the same "play next song" logic that it uses when in playback mode, but whatever. Dragging the slider to the end of the track accomplishes what I'm looking for, it's just a mild inconvenience.
Last but not least, it sometimes forgets how lists work. I'll start up Gapless and it'll set itself to the beginning of the last track I was listening to. That's fine; when I finish listening to music I let the next track start before closing the window (which, thankfully, stops playback). It plays through that song and then, instead of the next song on the album, or the next album in the list, sometimes it'll just randomly jump backwards a few albums and start playing from there.
It doesn't happen consistently, and the jumpback isn't consistent either. It's like it hits a weird kind of savepoint every once in a while, and then every time it loses its mind it'll jump to there. Then after a few albums it'll make/find a new savepoint and start jumping backwards to that instead. I... I just don't get it. How are people even able to make something break in that way? Like, that feels like something that would have to have been deliberately added.
Anyway, that's the dismal state of Linux music libraries as of May 2025. "Compares unfavorably to a version of iTunes from ten years ago" wasn't on my list when I switched OSes, but I guess I'm not surprised.
