How do you manage your audio?

I admit there is so much to discover in Linux be it the system itself, its learning curve, rich FOSS pool and - most importantly - the way it makes me quit my old Windows habits... Yet after a month of testing and customising the system, I still need to find a couple of apps, which would make my Linux life smoother. One of such 'a must' tools for me, as the one with a musical background, is an audio player.

During my normie years (the term I learned yesterday) , I've become addicted to AIMP, which, unfortunately, isn't gonna be Linux-friendly in the years (?) to come. Yes, I got used to it but I'm also eager to get and learn something new, even if it requires some extra work - one of the reasons I don't want to install Wine for AIMP, btw!

So far, I've tested Audacious, Clementine, Deadbeef, Lollypop, Rhythmbox and a few CLI-based players on my Pop OS distro. I'm not saying they're bad, yet none of them seem to be complete (to a certain degree, of course). Yes, they're free and open for the talented minds smarter than me to fiddle with themes and stuff like that but most of them come with tons of features the old-f*rts like me would ever use or lack some really neat and necessary features I've listed below from the top of my head that any music fan would appreciate - most importantly the joy of listening to pure music itself!

Anyway, a descent audio player for me is the one which:

• is lightweight and less memory-hungry. Such as Deadbeef but...
• has a customisable equaliser (EQ) !!! - the more settings the better. I mostly use FLAC, WAV and rarely MP3s.
  EDIT: I heard about PulseAudio and PulseEQ somewhere, which applies the audio settings to the whole system. I'll probably go with this one, still tinkering the idea...
• enables EQ profiling, when the select files play using the assigned EQ profile automatically
• can adjust bass, pitch, etc. for the select files
• has a queue manager, possibly with a drag-n-drop feature
• has a good (!) tag editor
• has customisable keyboard shortcuts, like jumping to next/prev/playing file in the playlist
• can quickly search files, incl. using the Unicode characters (English is not my mother tongue)
• can save settings in a human-readable configuration file, e.g. for later use

Features like album art, podcast listening, themes, visualisations, etc. - I can live without them in my age...

So, have a good one guys! And thanks for the tips!

Rustam

I use Audacious, but it looks like that might not be a good choice for you. It's been a long time since I've used Windows at home but I do remember that I had to make some mental adjustments trying to get used to music players in Linux. I've tried lots of them over the years. I have some others installed on various systems here, ones that are native to whatever DE is present, but I've kinda settled in with Audacious, and I use that on all of my systems.

mpv --shuffle *.wav

About all that I use.

Now as far as pulse, I have an RPi 4b running a pulseaudio server. Over jackdbus with a calf 30 band EQ plugin. The 3B+ could only handle about 20 band EQ. It suits my needs as only a one line config makes it get used (plus having networking to connect to it). "default-server = 192.168.2.3" in $HOME/.config/pulse/client.conf. And the changes to pulseaudio's default config in raspbian is less than a dozen lines. Plus a little dozen line bash script to set my parameters on jackdbus. It's quirky and takes a little manual trickery to get it working. But once it's up it's good. Last reboot was like 147 days on that one. And I only recently updated it because I updated my network with some switches to bring the whole thing under one subnet. I have another script for jack_connect, jack_disconnect to use the EQ plugin since qjackctl doesn't seem to function, but it's all good.

Take a look at the QMMP media player.

I've become quite fond of it over the years, and all my old Winamp skins are compatible with it.

Originally Posted by pinqvin [*]enables EQ profiling, when the select files play using the assigned EQ profile automatically[*]can adjust bass, pitch, etc. for the select files

DeadBeef has those features (and everything else in your list), just not on a per-file basis. Frankly, I've never seen that anywhere.
Also check out DeadBeef plugins!

Apart from that, here's about all there is:
https://alternativeto.net/software/aimp/?platform=linux
Add to that list gmusicbrowser.

try VLC music player, I'm a bass player and use a little vox pre amp to play along with music.
VLC is extremely configurable, works on all platforms. I have it on my apple phone and used it on my win 10 system, it is installed on my raspberry Pi's and will be installed on my desktop once I get it up and running.