I want to find a Linux music player that is similar to the one on Windows. I am most used to that one. I have tried a few different music players (there are a lot of options to go through) but I just want to narrow things down to the ones that function most like the Windows music player. Having been on Windows since the '90s and only having been on Linux for a year or so, I am just trying to make my experience as similar to what I am used to as possible. I made the switch mostly for privacy reasons.
Hi Samm, Welcome to the community. Please try Clementine player. I’ve also had success with Foobar2000.
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Clementine is what I use. It is somewhat cloned from Windows Media Player. You will see a lot of similarities. I find that I am able to do what I could in Windows and then some but without it being overly confusing.
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I’ll check both those out today, thanks!
I looked it up on images just to see what it looks like and it does look similar. I will have to see how it functions to know if I will like it or not though.
I’d forgotten about Clementine. I’ve just set up a Raspberry Pi as a media player in my house, and need to find a “pretty” player that displays album covers while it plays music, as it’s displaying on a 55" TV. 
One of the most solid music players on Linux that gives you a windows feel is QuodLibet. It is very light and it’s core speciality on powerful music organization and playback. The filtering and search functionality is as powerful as WMP’s advanced library. It handles compressed audio formats effortlessly.
I used to use AIMP years ago, and it looks like it’s still being supported and developed. It was highly customizable and felt like Winamp. You might want to take a look at that.
The Linux version of AIMP is not as expensive as the version that runs directly on windows. I think AIMP for Linux is in beta and still not released as an official app. This means one won’t be able to get support if something unexpected happens when using the app.
My music player choice updated 2025
Absolutely Strawberry music player.
This software was born as a fork of Clementine, made by an indipendent developer, with some collaborators, there’s a github repository often updated strawberry repository
Nowdays it’s only released for Linux because the author decided to make Windows and Mac Os versions payment, in some words you need to donate a bit before he’ll give you the binary download link.
Windows and Mac Os compiled versions are not updated, they are stuck at january 2024 and they won’t recive any future upgrade.
If you are brave enough you can try download the source code (C++ / QT) and compile it directly in Visual Studio.
This is my daily choice music player, and I listen alot of music everyday; it works better then Clementine, I use it often for listen some .pls files (webstreaming source audio), I tried open pls with Clementine and they won’t play on that player.
It offer eventually Spotify integration with an api key.
BONUS: I made a custom Discord rich presence in Python that works very well on Linux, it’s directly integrated with Dbus.
I tried to make a Windows version of this software but it’s not perfect because Dbus is not working on Windows, so I parse player cache files for know which song is currently playing.
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Strawberry works well but so ugly for me.
I’m still looking for the perfect player. I keep trying out different ones but I don’t feel 100% comfortable with any of them.
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Strawberry might look ugly, but you can customize a bit colors and some styles…
In my opinion and for my work cause is the best player because I found, for example, when you have huge music library in your hard drive such my case other programs start scanning your hard drive and build a local database for manage songs and eventually songs meta tags.
I find this behavior very annoying and un-necessary. As I open Strawberry I choose which songs I want to play from my local hard drive, drag and drop into playlist and click on “Play” button. That’s all! In case I modify my folder, I delete or I add songs, Strawberry does not need to build nothing, it’s just a simple file system explorer.
This feature is the one I love so much, Clementine does the same but as I said before it does not play .pls files and this is so bad for me.
In conclusion, Strawberry might look a bit ugly, but for functionality in my opinion it’s 11/10. It’s the only music player that have the exact functionalities I need.
@toadie I don’t know your use case, I’m just explaing my POV
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I’m more of a playlist kind of person and I like to have a customizable layout to search through my library for inspiration.
Thanks for this explanation. I’ll give it a try. To be honest, I’ve not heard about Strawberry before. I use the streaming platform that comes with my mobile plan.
But I remember the best feeling back in the day was WinAMP. Man, I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a music player as much since haha. Also, sad what happened.
You can still sort of enjoy it here: https://webamp.org/
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Yes I knew about Winamp, I used to use the last modern releases (version 5+) on Windows, but Winamp is not released for Linux as well…
For Windows from my POV best players are Winamp ofc and AIMP, they also have a nice Discord rich presence integration through a dll, but I find them a bit cumbersome for playlist … Strawberry is more intuitive and it’s designed better.
One cool thing about Winamp and AIMP are the skins, some or them are very cool 
!
…opinion of a music lover!
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I have used https://www.getmusicbee.com/ under Windows for a very long time.
As I said, I have not yet found what I was looking for under Linux. At the moment I use Quod Libet.
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Today i’ve played around with fooyin.
Very nice Player with scripting for personal layouts.
My first result
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