Please stop me if this is not the appropriate place to speak of issues like this one.
I believe an introduction is due. I have been a Ubuntu user for a little more than a year now and while the whole ecosystem is fantastic and smooth to use, it boggles me that there’s still no app that can match the versatility and easiness in use that Musicbee provides. Strawberry pales in comparison, foobar2000 is clunky and clumsy, Rhythmbox is really without any option for control over your library… Even Tauon (the most complete music player I have found so far) becomes overly, uselessly complex in certain moments. What’s your take on this issue? What do you use for browsing, editing and playing your music collection? Is there any way we’ll ever see something like Musicbee on Linux distros?
My take on this issue is that this sounds like a Musicbee promotion :p
How can a player that allows you to almost completely design your own UI be “clunky and clumsy”? foobar2000 can be anything from an unscrollable auto-generated playlist of “odd numbered tracks in the deathmetal genre” showing only “stop” and “play” buttons, to a dynamic / responsive UI that auto-scrolls song lyrics in time with the song that’s playing.
If you don’t like it, you don’t like it and that’s fine. Reading “clumsy” and “clunky” used to describe foobar2000 make me wonder what your approach to evaluating music players even is though.
Take this as a suggestion to give foobar2000 a little more time/effort. If you just aren’t into that though, I’d say Clementine is pretty solid.
If you add an edit to your post listing out your requirements, dealbreakers, and maybe giving a little detail on what you didn’t like about the players you listed, you’ll probably get responses that are more helpful :D
As a general rule of software, anything that is extremely customizable does tend to require more legwork to make it work for you. foobar2000 is nice, but it’s hardly polished from a UI perspective. Learning curves and customization get clunky in a hurry.
foobar2000 is the emacs of music players.
I still use the Windows version on Linux and my Mac. There is no replacing it.
That said, I do not think it is too hard for the average person to get a good usable UI with foobar2000, as long as they don’t mind the retro Windows UI style (this is a positive in my book). The DUI editor is pretty intuitive after you spend about 20 minutes plaing around with the sandbox. Foobar2000 2.0 added support for dark mode in Windows which looks really nice, but can be messy if you use any components that haven’t also been updated to support it.
Ahahah, alright I get it, but I’m no way sponsored by the one guy who built the software XD. But to answer seriously to your questions: the thing I loved about Musicbee was the ability to easily edit metadata of large collections of files seamlessly to a degree of precision and intuitiveness that, to me, feels unmatched. The integrated sound converter allows for compressing on the go. The UI is smooth and modern. The way it easily processed the addition of new files to the collection. It’s just a lot of little things which I keep on finding here or there with every new software that I try, but never all of them together, bundled into a simple package like MB. I know that foobar is considered to be just as versatile; but to set it up to work as nicely out of the box like Musicbee requires an investment in time and knowledge I don’t really have.