Like many types of software, the selection of a favorite music player is, to some extent, dependent on personal preferences. But I hope my reviews of music players helps narrow the field.
All music libraries are different, and the right open source music player can make a world of difference – especially if you’ve a large collection.
I’ve reviewed the vast majority of music players for Linux. But there are always ones I’ve missed.
mtoc (music table of contents) is billed as a visually-rich music player and library browser. It’s written in C++ and built with Qt, TagLib and GStreamer. It’s published under an open source license.
Installation
Probably the easiest way to install mtoc is via Flatpak. I’m not the biggest fan of Flatpak. It does make installation easy, avoids any dependency nightmares, but it’s wasteful of disk space.
I did try to build the software from source under Ubuntu 25.04. I installed all the program’s dependencies but the cmake .. command failed with the output complaining that Qt6QuickEffects could not be found. I’m not an expert at compiling programs and I’d rather not waste the developer’s time in raising an issue. Instead, I evaluated the software with the Flatpak. I’ll get compilation working I’m sure.
Install the Flatpak.
$ flatpak install flathub org._3fz.mtoc
In Operation
On first run, click the Edit Library button and tell the program where your music folders are stored (the default is set to ~/Music) and click the green Scan Library button.
As you can see, the top left of the window hosts an album carousel designed for music enthusiasts who like flipping through their collection.
There’s a mini player available.
The software supports a good range of music formats including the essential FLAC. Metadata is extracted using TagLib 2.0. Playlists are supported with good queueing features. There’s state persistence, MPRIS 2 support, together with sensible keyboard shortcuts.
The settings section lets you define the queue behaviour, set various display options (besides layout mode, you can choose the theme, the mini player layout, and thumbnail size). There’s also support for pre-amplification and replay gain.
Summary
mtoc is a reasonable music player. The program has a good implementation of gapless playback in the latest release.
However, it’s difficult to recommend the music player. I’m not a fan of the interface nor the design, but some users may like it. The mini player gets a thumbs up. Things like that are subjective. My biggest beef is the program’s stability (or lack of it). The first time I chose a large music library the program crashed after scanning the library. The software crashed when I tried switching from wide to compact layout mode. Given that the program crashes fairly frequently, I wouldn’t recommend the software in its current state.
The software isn’t good at picking up album covers. Many of my album covers are not embedded in files and the program misses those. And your music collection needs to have spotless metadata otherwise you’ll find albums split up all over the place.
I use the same small music collection when assessing memory consumption. The useful ps_mem utility reports that memory usage is around 244MB which is on the high side for a music player.
My recommended open source music players remain fooyin and Tauon. See my roundup of the finest graphical music players for more information.
Website: github.com/asa-degroff/mtoc
Support:
Developer: Asa DeGroff
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
mtoc is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.