fooyin is a customisable music player that strongly resembles foobar2000. Unlike foobar2000, fooyin is open source and available for Linux.
I’ve written a few articles about this music player in the past although not for a while. That’s simply because it’s been almost a year since a new release. That’s not a criticism, just a reflection that real-life commitments can impede the development of open source software when it’s almost exclusively developed by a single individual.
Installation
I normally just issue git pull and build the source code. But this time I also tested the program on a fresh installation of Ubuntu 25.04. I built the program from its source code (the project’s instructions work perfectly without any changes needed), and I also tested the .deb package for Ubuntu 25.04 (codename Plucky Puffin).
The source code builds without any issues. But the Plucky Puffin deb package didn’t install on Ubuntu 25.04 out of the box with release v0.9.0. The system is missing dependencies, specifically qt6-image-formats-plugins, libtag1v5, ffmpeg, and libicu72 even though I installed all the program’s dependencies. This issue appears to have been fixed with the latest commits.
What’s new in v0.9.1
From my perspective, the most important new feature with v0.9.1 is the ability to download and save artwork and changing embedded artwork. Some of my music collection is missing album covers. It’s great to be able to add covers direct from fooyin.
The process is simple. Play a track. Right click and choose Search for artwork from the dropdown menu. fooyin searches for artwork from MusicBrainz (Cover Art Archive), LastFM, and Discogs.
For many genres, it’s a big time-saver. But it’s very hit and miss affair with classical music despite a code tweak by the developer following a GitHub issue I raised. I’m not certain there’s an easy fix though as I’m unaware of better sources for images other than to manually browse the net.
The match threshold slider helps a bit.
The new release has also added support for finding, saving, and editing lyrics. Sources for lyrics are local files, metadata tags, LRCLIB, NetEase CloudMusic, QQ Music. There’s also the DarkLyrics source but that’s not enabled by default.
The other feature added is autoplaylist functionality, which are playlists generated from a query.
There are a collection of other improvements and bug fixes too.
Summary
I believe fooyin is the finest open source music player available for Linux. If you’ve never tried this program, do yourself a big favour and download it today!
The developer will be releasing further bugfix releases . There are lots of outstanding issues on the project’s GitHub issues section. Many of the bugs identified are edge cases that don’t impact on my enjoyment of the project. And I’ve identified bugs which I’m not sure have been reported. For example, when playing music in the directory browser, selection skips backs to the top if the directory has a lot of tracks. The developer has fixed this issue!
There are interesting features planned on the project’s ROADMAP. If I had to name one feature that most interests me it would be internet radio support. But fooyin’s implementation will have to be rather special if its to usurp the likes of Shortwave and Tuner as my default internet radio apps.
Website: github.com/fooyin/fooyin
Support:
Developer: Luke Taylor
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
fooyin is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.