Navidrome clients on Linux

Navidrome (Github repo) is a self-hosted music streaming server. It has a web interface, but it's not the smoothest to use, and I'd prefer not to play music from a browser tab.

From initial post on Navidrome I ended up using Symfonium on my phone. It works well, and is very actively maintained.

On Linux, there are a bunch of desktop clients for it. Many of them have puns around "sonic" (being compatible with the Subsonic API), which makes them a bit confusing to keep track of.. thus a post here, so I can revisit in the future.

The requirements I have are fairly minimal:

• Can play music
• Can cache songs offline (e.g for on laptop)
• Some kind of temporary "queue" playlist

Feishin

A popular client seemed to be sonixd - which is now in maintenance only mode - and is being rewritten under a new name feishin

I didn't try sonixd as it will supposedly be unmaintained once the rewrite is done.

Feishin essentially clones the Spotify, and looks fairly decent. I prefer the "old style" music players where it's a columns of "artists, albums, songs", but the Spotify style isn't too bad.

However, it's core functionally still needs a bit of polish:

• it's interface seemed a bit laggy (e.g there's a maybe 1 second delay switching to the artist list, noticeable delay in loading artwork when scrolling artist list)
• there's also (at least for me, in v0.5.3) some bug for me where it pauses and plays many times per second, which breaks the audio playback or makes the application extremely flickery

That said, it is in quite an early state - has been actively developed for about a year at this point - worth revisiting in a year or two.

Sublime Music

Sublime Music is written in Python. It's packaged in the Ubuntu repos so can be installed with apt install sublime-music easily. Seems to work nicely.

Only complaint I have is on XFCE applications don't tend to pick up the dark mode preference - and, remarkably, Sublime Music has almost no preferences (which is quite impressive as music players preferences tend towards infinite checkboxes) - but does mean there's no obvious way to force it into dark mode.

Supersonic

Supersonic is written in Go, with an interface design very similar to Spotify.

It looks quite good, but currently is lacking offline support, which is planned.

A few minor complaints:

• The UI feels slightly strange - small things like scrolling the artist list is a bit slower than I'd expect.
• There are 7 icons at the top, with no labels or tooltips indicating what they are.
• The artists list uses large icons, plus the artist name and album count - meaning the list is quite long. There is also no way to scroll to artists starting with specific letter. So it makes finding artist without typing a bit tedious.

Updates

• 4th Nov 2024

  • Have been using Sublime Music occasionally, and it mostly works pretty fine. Occasionally it gets into a state where python traceback errors occur, and bits of it's UI aren't great (e.g in the "Artists" tab, to find a particular artist by name seems to mean I have to use the "Search everything" box, which first lists a bunch of matching songs), but noghing major
  • Feishin 0.11 seems to work a lot better, the interface seems a lot smoother, and playback seems to work
  • Supersonic I didn't try the newest 0.13 release yet

• 18th Dec 2024

  • Feishin is now being rewritten again as audioling, to use Tauri instead of Electron.