GNOME Music Should No Longer Be So Sluggish

[kaprikawn]

The thing you often hear people say (type?) on the internet is that the only reason they can't give up their Windows install is because of games. For me, it's games and music. This article only reinforces my perception that there's no good music players on Linux. I've looked extensively (admittedly this was a while ago). I find it curious when you see people, and there's evidence in this thread, of recommending this music player or that music player on Linux.

They're ALL mediocre to bad, not one of them comes anywhere close to Media Monkey (my preferred) or Foobar2000.

I watched the video of the speed improvements on the guy's machine, it's a fairly impressive speed bump and kudos to him for putting in the effort. But even after the fix, the speed was unacceptable. Like someone else in the thread has already said, why the UI locks just to load album art is a head scratcher (mind you, I'm baffled by anyone who loads into album art view anyway, but I have ~250GB of mostly flac, I like just a list view).

[grok]

Funnily I found out that Audacious 3.6 (or later if that exists) is now available for Windows and I can run that on Windows if I need some easy to use and dependable player, quickly.

I am not very much interested in "music libraries" though. A file manager in list view will do, this makes a music player much simpler. 15 years ago you could load 8,000 tracks in Winamp 2.x and play them in random mode if you wanted, that only took a few seconds. It had lazy loading of MP3 tags i.e. didn't try to load metadata for thousands of files when only dozens files are shown on the visible portion of the playlist.
I'm sure it didn't even need to open or access each of the 8000 files ; OS or file system provides for means to list a directory's content I suppose.

If you like a music library go for it. Let's say you want to play something in that ~250GB from an unrelated, slow PC that accesses the files over slow local network (or 100BaseT, which is very decent), then not using a music library will be nice too, as you add files to the playlist very quickly instead of building a database.

[haagch]

I was always happy with quodlibet https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Simple and was always fast enough for 90 or so Gigabyte.
Only the initial indexing takes a while of course, but still acceptable.

[srakitnican]

Tried Clementine and Audiacious, did not like Clementine very much don't remember why exactly, Audiacious on the other hand feels more close in functionality and speed to classic Windows apps. It even restores exact song position on a playlist on reboot, something that Gnome players can only dream off. It even have a classic Winamp skin for nostalgic users.

Audiacious is missing a library functionality though, for those that care.

What I expect from a music player:
* fast
* low system resources usage
* ability to run in background (tray icon)
* simple, non cluttered interface

[caligula]

The thing you often hear people say (type?) on the internet is that the only reason they can't give up their Windows install is because of games. For me, it's games and music. This article only reinforces my perception that there's no good music players on Linux. I've looked extensively (admittedly this was a while ago). I find it curious when you see people, and there's evidence in this thread, of recommending this music player or that music player on Linux.

They're ALL mediocre to bad, not one of them comes anywhere close to Media Monkey (my preferred) or Foobar2000.

I watched the video of the speed improvements on the guy's machine, it's a fairly impressive speed bump and kudos to him for putting in the effort. But even after the fix, the speed was unacceptable. Like someone else in the thread has already said, why the UI locks just to load album art is a head scratcher (mind you, I'm baffled by anyone who loads into album art view anyway, but I have ~250GB of mostly flac, I like just a list view).

This is correct, most Linux music players suck. I think the main reason for the slow speed is lack of coding skills. Not only do they need threading, they need to understand disk I/O, systems programming, and the task queue mechanism. User needs immediate feedback. It's only possible if the app prioritizes the updates to those files that are visible in the GUI. But at the same time, when the user does nothing, the app must efficiently browse and study the other files, yet maintaining responsiveness of the GUI. This can go wrong on so many levels. Even basic directory traversal can be twice as fast with 'find' or 'ls -R' compared to some ad-hoc way in some language/toolkit. Note that even 'find' can be slow. It doesn't know when stuff is located on multiple physical disks. The fastest directory traversal starts a new instance for each encountered disk. I use a simple mpd clone I wrote myself. It doesn't even read tags, the artist/album/track_num/song_name data is encoded in the file name. Works lightning fast. Sadly my player doesn't support any advanced features, you can only search and jump to some track and it continues from there either sequentially or randomly. It delegates playback to mpv. Still better than most.

[friarzen]

People just accept this shit nowadays. The app generation is full of clueless idiots. I started with mp3s on my 486DX66 and Winamp, it was a step up from scream tracker modules and midi. Now people have 4 GHz octa-core setups, 64 GB of RAM and NVMe SSD. The DACs support up to 64-bit audio @ several thousands of kilohertz. Still, everything may feel slow, slower than in 1995 on that particular 486DX. For instance my Android phone has 128 GB of storage. I decided to store all my ripped music on the internal storage so that I can play my fav music on road trips. A big fail. I couldn't find a single Android music player that won't die when browsing the music library. They're also slow as hell and crash prone. It's a mess.

I'd be interested to see how FolderPlayer works for that. I've got 32GB of music on my phone and haven't noticed much in the way of problems with it, but it is pretty old sk00l as UI's go.

[cj.wijtmans]

Sorry, but that's still pretty stupid. Why does the app block at all just to load album art?
It should just load immediately and try loading art 1 at a time in a background thread going from top to bottom.

it should load art at demand.