>And the name is terrible.

The name is just a piece of hacker lore from back in the day

https://catb.org/jargon/html/D/DEADBEEF.html

I know what it is, that doesn't make it good.

It's amazing how bad software developers are at naming their projects. At least this one is unique enough to be searchable, and could probably be SEO'ed above the computer lore (indeed, at least for me it's already #1 for "deadbeef" on the Google SERP).

The worst are when they pick a generic English word for a project that has nothing to do with that word. I'm not going to name and shame, but there are so many examples of new project that get posted to HN monthly that have irrelevant and unsearchable names. We see things like "Show HN: Banana - A lightweight URL parsing library in Rust". WTF does URL parsing have to do with bananas? How do you expect that word to be uniquely searchable back to your project??

The thing that gets me is application launchers, I'm fine with any clever and obscure name you pick for something that's intended to be behind the scenes as presumably there's going to be a certain amount of promotion or awareness inside whatever domain is involved. However if a launcher (or a repository/app store as an earlier step) just gives the clever name with no context to what it does rather than "CleverName - media tag information editor".

It can go too far the other direction too, for example the generic names like Files, Phone, etc either preloaded on the device by the manufacturer (eg Samsung) or by Google, or some third party.

Yes, my tablet has Contacts (icon: a blue figure on a white background), and then it has Contacts (icon: a white figure on a blue background), depending on which tech firm I want to spy on my social relationships.

> It can go too far the other direction too, for example the generic names like Files

The worst is when an application's display name is different from its actual name. Like on my MATE desktop it took me years to fully internalize that “Files” is actually `caja` if I want to invoke it from a terminal. At least Nautilus was a type of shell lol

Probably meaningful in another language. For instance it means "box" in Spanish, or in the language of the Pali Tipitaka it means "giving up".

"Why hasn't Gimp found mainstream success?"

"Adoption of our Ogg Vorbis format isn't where we hoped it to be"

"Fork me on Git"

Git is just a hobby project named after the author, like Linux.

Yes, really:

https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/git.wiki.kernel.org/index...

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html

Neat! Both Linux and Git are examples of terrible product names.

Isn't it obvious ? Lightweight URL parsing library in Rust is just Bananas!

But i totally get your point.

I'm wondering that if some random gibberish might even be better to name a project nowadays. At least there would be less SEO collision.

My experience is that the most overloaded software project name is “Apollo”. I worked at one big company that had three different internal services by that name. I blame NASA for this one :v

Blame the ancient Greeks!

If it makes you feel any better I worked for a company that referred to each of an internal tooling library, an externally-facing web app and an offshore consultant as 'Zeus'

I think that "Go" (the programming language) takes the crown.

It is one of the most common words in the English language. It is also one of the most popular board games in the world, and it has nothing to do with it. It can mean plenty of other things, just look at the Wikipedia disambiguation page. It is enough of a problem that it is often called "golang" to make it more searchable.

And ironically, it is made by Google.

The best part is that it wasn't even an original name within the domain of programming languages: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9

Agreed that Go is a terrible language name. Just go use Go to make a game of go while riding the GO train.

C is pretty terrible too, being a popular and extremely influential language with a one-letter name.

It's because we don't care, labels are arbitrary and if your app is any good you can call it Chimpanzee Hot Dog Fart and people will still use it. Honestly, my personal stretch goal for my dev career is to invent an app that's so useful to corporate America as to be indispensable and then call it ThumbBum just to force people to reference it in professional contexts. "Jared I need you to get on ThumbBum right now. Lives are at stake."

This is exactly why Terry Gilliam named his production company Poo Poo Pictures. He liked the idea of studio executives having to ask their assistants "Did the Poo Poo memo come in yet?"

> Strawberry is better for me but still kind of janky

Strawberry isn't the most solid program (a few times a year, its search hiccups and gets stuck for a few seconds), but it carries the torch of Clementine's UX - which is my ideal music listening experience.

Which itself carried the torch of Amarok 1.x's UX. No software rewrite, not even GNOME2→GNOME3, ever hurt me as much as Amarok 1.4 → 2.0

Compare Amarok 1.4: https://amarok.kde.org/files/amarok14/shot7.png

To Amarok 2.0 alpha 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110820190636/http://blog.lydia...

It was so widely disappointing that the “Amarok 2.0 FAQ” had an entry for “IMO Amarok 2.0 looks terrible” even though that's not a question lol https://web.archive.org/web/20090208231357/http://amarok.kde...

Luckily the Clementine project came along to deliver a straight port of Amazon 1.4 from Qt3 to Qt4 which was all 99% of people really wanted.

*James Rolfe voice* What were they thinking‽‽

Ouch. I loved Amarok 1.x back in the day. That was... something.

Right - how could I forget Amarok ? And I too was pushed to Clementine by Amarok 2.0

I really miss Foobar2000 on Linux (I've tried it a few times with Wine, and was never impressed vs. running it natively on Windows), so this looks like it might be just up my alley - especially since it has custom tag support.

Still using wine+foobar2000 as my music player here. The only issue I can think of is sometimes when when turning my screens off and back on, the UI might be glitched and need a restart.

> (I've tried it a few times with Wine, and was never impressed vs. running it natively on Windows)

Really? I noticed it's slower to start up but other than that it seems the same. I use it pretty regularly because foobar components handle formats the others can't.

Other than that, I'd say Audacious is the closest Linux analogue to foobar2000. My one big gripe was freezing up for a bit when a stream cuts out (blocking socket?) but they fixed that.

Last time I tried it (quite long ago), I recall having some audio issues. Maybe I should try again... that was back when my old audio interface (that only ever worked on XP, since they never released production-grade drivers for Win7) finally died.

Give it another try. I switched to Linux in 2022 and have been using fb2k via Wine all this time, and it runs perfectly.

Music players are a great example of a type of app that at first brush seems simple and difficult to do badly, but in reality is littered with subtleties and bits that hinge on the preferences of the user, all of which can make or break the app.

Makes it easy to understand why there’s more players than can be counted but few worth using.

That's because they all try to be more than they should be. I don't need or want a visualization option. I don't need or want an equalizer. I don't need or want a library. Those functions properly belong in other places or in the waste bin. My music library is on my filesystem and is sorted and arranged as I prefer. When I want to play an album I drag it over to MPC-HC. When I want to create a custom playlist, I open the playlist and drag songs over in the order I want. I don't need a psychedelic visualization, my use case for playing music on my pc is as background audio. The function of an equalizer is to make up for shortcomings in my speakers and belongs there. The media player should convert an encoded file into PCM data to be shoved out the DAC. Leave the file managing to my file manager. The sound shaping to my speakers. And the crap frequency domain visualizations in the trash.

Perfect. The only thing left is to convince every other user to share your opinions. </s>

I’ve of two minds on this. On one hand I agree, because the more functionality a music player has the more likely some of it will miss the mark, but on the other hand I find file managers as they currently exist are somewhat inadequate and incapable of fully replacing a library management system in a music player.

Without going too far out into the weeds, lack of integration between filemanagers/filesystems and music players is the main problem. File managers aren’t conducive to sorting by audio file metadata - even those that support it force the user to manually enable those columns in list mode and support is spotty across file formats, meaning the user has to fall back on “hacks” like modifying filenames to sort properly when sorting by name.

Additionally, the browser-type design that’s dominant in file managers doesn’t lend to versatile use with other programs.

This is one area where I think BeOS had the right idea. There, audio metadata was accessible by way of the filesystem which made it easy to access by applications and meant that the file manager more robustly supported sorting by that metadata. Additionally, the file manager was similar to that of Classic Mac OS where windows were dead simple and each represented a single folder, which made it easy to use a file manager window as a playlist window.

None of this is universal.

Putting the equalizer upstream at the speaker level means that all of your audio is affected by it. And yet there are many times where I am playing certain types of music, such as classical or tracker impulse chiptune that needs some adjustments - i'd much rather be able to adjust it at the playlist and/or player level.

The advantage of a music player that builds a library from a set of folders is that it's infinitely faster to be able to do fuzzy searches particularly around metadata such as Idv3 tags.

Etc. etc.

>My music library is on my filesystem and is sorted and arranged as I prefer.

How do you manage albums that could be classified as two or more genres?

Are you sure that you actually want to use a computer to play music?

It sounds like you don't need or want a music player.

I have tried A LOT of different music players over the years on Linux and the amount of ones that do not offer a single easy way to find a given album by a given artist is truly maddening.

I have recently landed on Tauon which has a pretty particular UI that is pretty unlike most others, but after some getting used to worked well for me. Audacious is mostly fine as well, but at some point I did not want to use it anymore because it would just stop responding to MPRIS events too often

For remote playing I have been really enamoured with Navidrome (in combination with Symfonium) lately. It's not super pretty, but it really has the best organization of albums I have seen so far and I kinda just dont use it for local files, because I dont want to do everything in the browser...

> How in 2025 music players refuse to (not can't, refuse to) get "Album Artist" right blows my mind

Apple Music on macOS broke album artist (click the artist column a few times) a few releases ago and you now have to resort it on every launch. Maddening. They then added an explicit “sort by album artist” column which… does not work.

Quod Libet handles album artists properly with the right sorting options? (And also it's one of the few that supports original release date, another seemingly essential feature that few players support.)

In Musium (https://docs.ruuda.nl/musium/) I also handle collaboration albums that have multiple album artists, based on Musicbrainz album artist id.

If they changed something in the last year, maybe. But last time I dug into this in detail they screwed it up out of the box, specifically by refusing to use the same mp3 ID3 tag that most other software including Picard uses. So for FLACs it worked, but for MP3s it did not, until I went in and edited the code.

At the time, the developers claimed changing it to work as people would expect it to would break existing user workflows and so they wouldn't do it.

What your exact issues with quod libet? As someone who's main criteria were (1) replaygain support (2) good album artist sort and (3) simple interface, quod libet is where I landed.

What are the own goals you speak of?

> How in 2025 music players refuse to (not can't, refuse to) get "Album Artist" right blows my mind.

And many of the few that get "Album Artist" won't respect tags that set the sort order for it either. If you are lucky, they will at least special case "The" so that "The Beatles" are under B, but they'll still put John Denver under "J".

The only one I know of that gets both of these right is cmus; I don't choose to use a terminal-based music player, I'm forced to.