I’ve got a large music library of FLAC and some mp3’s that I own. Yes I listen almost exclusively to music I own because being intentional about an activity makes it more meaningful.

When I was an Apple guy I just used the built in Music App (formely iTunes) because I was mostly streaming and even my purchased music had been either ripped into iTunes or purchased via the platform. Now that I’ve been happily on Fedora for a few years and focused on music I own I needed to find some new options.

CMUS

For the TUI (text user interface) users out there I haven’t found anything better than cmus. On Fedora you can install cmus via sudo dnf install cmus or I use home-manager so I added it to my home.nix file and then rebuilt the configuration.

To add music to cmus press 5 which will switch to the file browser. Then navigate to your Music and press a. Since I store all my music at ~/Music I can simply select that folder press a then type :save. If you add new music to the folder repeat this process to add the whole folder again.

cums doesn’t move your music into a library, or mess with your files. It remembers where the files are and reads the metadata in them to organize your library. It also saves cache files alongside your library so it knows all about your music base on the embedded metadata.

To play tracks in your library press 1 to view your library organized by artist. Then use the arrow keys or vim keys to navigate your library. Pressing tab will let you access the albums you have from an artist and then choose a specific album you want to listen to. To start music playing press c and to stop press it again.

If you want to shuffle tracks you can do that by pressing s or if you want to shuffle entire albums press &.

To create a playlist, highlight the album or song you want to add then press y. The only visual indicator that anything happened is that the highlight will move down one row. Out of the box cmus will save your playlists to the Default playlist.

To create your own playlist press 3 to get to the playlist view and then type pl-create <nameofyourplaylist>. Next you’ll need to mark it as the active playlist by highlighting it and pressing space. You’ll notice that the * moves to the playlist you just set as active. Then you can go back to your library and add songs to your playlist by pressing y when you’ve highlighted a song you want to add.

You can organize your playlist by highlighting a track and pressing p to move the track down or Shift P to move the track up in the order. Pressing Shift D will remove the track from your playlist.

There is still a bunch of stuff you can do in cmus, but this will get you going. If you want more information then fire up the tutorial by typing man cmus-tutorial in your terminal or view the full manual with man cmus.

Sayonara

Sayonara is the best GUI app I’ve found to play my music library on Fedora. Just like cmus it plays my local files, doesn’t move them and simply stores metadata about the library so I know what I have.

For Sayonara go to the Library menu across the top of the app and then import your ~/Music directory that has all your files. If you add new music to the folder head back to the Library menu and choose ‘Reload Library’. I always pick Fast Scan and then my new music shows up in a few seconds.

One knock against Sayonara is the busy interface, but I did a bunch of searching and while other apps look a bit nicer I ran into issues with how they played music if they worked at all.

Given the GUI nature of Sayonara, click around to the album you want to play then press the play button and listen to your music. I don’t think I need to provide much else in the way of instructions.

Do you have a favourite local music player for Linux? I’d love to hear about it.