Alternative apps: Media & Streaming

While most of our media consumption on desktop mostly takes place inside a browser, there are still topics to cover around them like a general local media player, local music libraries, conversion and so on. Here are the apps.

Local Media Playback:

VLC Media Player

The pinnacle of “it just works”. Basically displays anything you can imagine. With some love it also supports Blu-ray playback (More on that on page 27.

Tauon Music Box

A modern music player with a huge featureset. Supports playback of local files, can control Spotify playback, supports Airsonic as well as koel servers, gets all kind of informations and data about your music from online sources and may even sync existing guitar chords with the song. Definitely worth checking out if you got a sizeable library of music.

Kodi

Works as a media center and is mostly meant to be used on TVs or similar setups. Supports any kind of music and or videos, automatically fetches metadata from online sources to properly label movies, series or music.
You can remotely control the app with your smartphone through the app “Kore“.

Streaming services with Apps in Software Store:

Spotify

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TIDAL

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Apple Music
(via Cider)

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Napster

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Pandora
(via Pithos, Radio only)

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NetEase

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QQmusic

Other services ‘natively’ available via:

WebApps

WebApps is a really handy tool to “natify” websites into desktop applications. Only thing you need is an icon you want to use for the app (.png format) and a Browser that is also installed for WebApps to use (recommend Brave for this as it works very well for me).
On Linux Mint it is a preinstalled app. The easiest way on the other distros is to download the newest .deb install package here.

Media Utilities & More

Handbrake
(Media Conversion)

Powerful conversion with a lot of sane presets and support for basically any codec. Also supports ripping of optical media, including Blu-ray, if you made the necessary preparations as with VLC Player (More on that on page 27). Should cover all your needs.

MusicBrainz Picard
(Media Tagging)

A powerful tool to clean up your music library. It is able to repare files if necessary, look up metadata like names and albums of song files without any name, add cover art either to the folder or the files itself and a lot more.

PavuControl
(Media Control)

Usually your Linux distro should already come with a capable tool to select the used audio device per application, the proper profile for your sound cards and so on. If not, this is the tool you’re looking for.

EasyEffects
(Media Control)

Very powerful equalizer tool.

EasyTag
(Media Tagging)

A simple tool to edit metadata of your media files.

Shortwave
(Web Radio)

Web Radio app that features more than 25.500 available stations from all over the world. Includes current song information, automatic song download and more.

Regain Privacy – Your Computer [Linux Megaguide]
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