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?
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.