looking for accessible music library app

Linux for blind general discussion blinux-list at redhat.com
Mon Jan 17 03:27:06 UTC 2022


What do you mean when you say "like iTunes?" Although I know some of 
what it is supposed to be able to do, I never used it, so I'm not sure 
what functionality you need. Are you trying to download music, to 
organize it or to play it? The best place to buy downloadable music now 
is probably Amazon, as unless I'm missing a site where I can buy flac or 
wav files from my favorite artists, Amazon has the best selection of mp3 
files available for purchase. As for organizing music, I have seen many 
library style databases integrated into all kinds of player software 
that comes and goes, but nothing beats the good old filesystem. Files 
are usually already named according to either Artist - Title, Track# - 
Artist - Title or Track# - title, and those files are either stored 
inside the main music folder or in a folder named as Artist - Album, or 
at least this is what works best for me. Specifically, if I have a full 
album, I store the songs in Artist - Album/Track# - Title format. If I 
don't have a full album, say I have just 3 songs by an artist, most of 
the time from different albums, I just store them as Artist - Title in 
my Music folder, which incidentally is added to my home folder 
automatically by xdg-dirs I believe it's called, which is a tool 
integrated into most desktops that just kinda sets up the home folder 
with some reasonably logical locations for things. Many music players 
exist, but I tend to look for mpris-compatible players, as I have set up 
shortcut keys that call playerctl to perform various functions. Some of 
the best music players include Audacious, which used to have its own 
hotkey shortcut functionality but seems to lack the feature in a screen 
reader accessible way now, Clementine, which does have shortcut key 
functionality and can minimize to the notification tray, Strawberry, 
which is a fork of Clementine, but has some additional preference 
options, Deadbeef, which is somewhat like Audacious in its 
functionality, and then there's good old vlc, which has its issues 
playing files gaplessly, but plays audio and video files in many 
formats, and mpv, which plays even more audio and video files and can 
even play them straight off Youtube and other websites. If you're 
specifically looking for library database and player functionality in a 
single package, Clementine, Strawberry and Rhythmbox can all do this, 
although I don't use that specific functionality, so I couldn't tell you 
how well it works. Many of the players I mention here will also allow 
you to fix their tags if they're not correct for some reason, or write 
them if they don't already exist as well. If there is some other 
functionality you needed that I'm not aware of, feel free to let me 
know. Hope this helps.

~Kyle




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