There are plenty of software tools and programs that have been with me for decades. On Windows, that would be Total Commander, Notepad++, or 7-Zip. On Linux, for me it’s the GNOME desktop with its ecosystem of Evolution, Gedit, and Nautilus. That’s true even though it has moved far away from the look and feel of the old GNOME 2 days, and despite the often justified criticism of the developers’ “we remove important features” policy.
Besides these graphical tools, the Music Player Daemon, MPD for short, has been with me for a long time too. The name sounds cryptic at first, but the concept behind it is simple. MPD is a music player that runs in the background and can be remote-controlled through numerous clients. So you can hook a computer or Raspberry Pi up to your stereo, add your own music collection, and control playback from anywhere in the house.
Music Player Daemon aka MPD
MPD is quite different from streaming servers like Jellyfin or Navidrome, which are based on the Subsonic protocol. With those, the server streams the music to the clients. With MPD, the client only controls playback, and the service itself plays directly on the server. What I find remarkable is that development on MPD hasn’t fizzled out even after more than twenty years. The current stable version, MPD 0.24.6, has only just been released.
You can tell that MPD is still alive and kicking on the client side as well. Modern Subsonic clients for Linux (especially for the GNOME desktop) have unfortunately become really rare. Sublime Music and Sonixd have been discontinued, and I can’t warm to Feishin or Supersonic. Around MPD, on the other hand, new projects keep popping up. Lately, more and more apps are appearing based on GTK4 and Libadwaita, which fit perfectly into the current GNOME design and make good use of the desktop’s features.
MPD for GNOME: Plattenalbum
Plattenalbum (Flathub) just received an update to version 2.4.0 and uses GTK4 without getting lost in an overly playful design. The album covers are clearly the center of the interface. The layout stays classic: artists on the left, albums in the middle, and on the right the player with the controls for playback.
If you want to read the lyrics during playback, use the button above the player to switch to the lyrics view. The lyrics don’t have to be stored in the ID3 tag. Plattenalbum loads them automatically from the Brazilian service Letras, which is especially handy if your own files aren’t fully tagged. There aren’t many settings, and honestly, it doesn’t need many.
MPD for GNOME: Euphonica
Unlike Plattenalbum, Euphonica (Flathub) relies much more on visual effects. The window background adapts to the colors of the current album, and an animated spectrum moves along the bottom edge. When you switch between the artist and album views or open an album, the individual elements glide smoothly into view, which gives it a modern feel.
Euphonica also convinces functionally. You can navigate through artists and albums, and filtering by genre is supposed to come in the future. With MPD 0.24 or newer, you can rate albums. Through MPRIS, Euphonica integrates seamlessly into the desktop, shows notifications when the track changes, and lets you control playback through the desktop’s own functions as well.
In general, it would be great if a new GTK4/Libadwaita client for Subsonic showed up again. Navidrome runs very reliably on my small self-hosting server. For Android, there’s Symfonium (proprietary, but worth every cent) and Tempus, an actively developed version of the FOSS client Tempo. Navidrome’s web frontend works great too. On the desktop, though, a native app is missing, and right now there’s a big gap.
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