Recommended Music players?

I use Rhythmbox, it's good if you have meta-data and you want to organize. You could also use a console based music player, but they're not really up to my standards the last time I used them and I forgot what that reason was. I think it was it lists by artist, but I want to list by album and none of the console based players I found had that feature.

But Rhythmbox is great for ripping CDs, CDs are a nice experience, All copyright could be abolished and I'd still buy first party CDs.

I've tried most of the different music players. I always end up back with VLC. It is not the prettiest, but it has the most functions that I use. Clementine is probably my second favorite. Very good if you want a lot of radio stations and want to use a good Amarok fork. cvlc is a good command line version of VLC if you are ever stuck in a command line-only environment.

Audacious and cmus are great.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Cmus

If you're asking for a music player, then Audacious is perfect.

Rhythmbox is much more than a music player. I don't wish to let it arrange my music files.

Does it support .ape files?

I just tested a sample from the site below and it works fine in Hyperbola's packaged version of audacious.

http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/lossless/

Monkey's Audio (*.ape) is not a free-as-in-freedom format.

There are free implementations of Monkey's audio in Rockbox, ffmpeg and a JAVA one called JMAC (audacious's implementation is probably based on one of these three). The main issue with the format is high CPU usage while decoding, but this issue probably isn't significant for desktop usage (there are also other audio formats with high CPU usage such as Opus).

I bet it could run .ape files too.

mpv uses ffmpeg, so if your installed version of ffmpeg supports Monkey's audio so will mpv.

I recently tried several music players after some comparison and I ended up chosing Sayonara Player wich seems a good choice for organizing and listening a music collection
https://sayonara-player.com/

I searched something light that would let me do that simple tasks efficiently, without tons of features I never use.
It is free software GPLv3.
It associates a good looking interface with advanced files tagging functionality and cd covers search and download. Like Clementine, it has a smooth volume transitions between files, wich is a must have for me. It also features some web radios, including soma.fm that I like. I tend to use it with kid3 to tag a large number of files.

Guayadeque is also a good choice regarding files tagging and cd covers handling as it is able to and write the cover image on files metadata for multiple files at once. Some sites claim Sayonara can also do it, but as far as I understand it just pastes the cover on the album directory.

I also like installing the Python script Cd cover thumbnailer https://projects.flogisoft.com/cover-thumbnailer/ (requires nautilus for installation but works well with Mate after that), though it uses some extra ressources to display the covers.

I've recently gotten amarok running by installing the Trinity Desktop Environment. Once that's installed, you can invoke amarok from within Trinity, or from most other desktops by running /opt/trinity/bin/amarokapp from a terminal.

I mostly use Audacious and Pragha https://pragha-music-player.github.io/

> I've heard good things about Clementine and Rhythmbox although for now
> I've simply been using VLC Media Player.

If you like text-based interfaces and vim-like keybindings, I recommend
cmus.

Quodlibet is my favourite. Best plugins (especially the equilizer). Soundcloud Integration. Internet Radio.
https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/