Linux offers a wide range of free and open source music players, from desktop defaults to excellent cross-platform options. Many are mature, powerful, and support online music services, giving users plenty of choice.
Every music collection is different, and the right player can make a big difference, especially for large libraries.
Ratic is an offline music player for Linux. It’s designed for playing local music collections rather than relying on streaming services. It’s built with Rust together with GTK, libadwaita, relm, and GStreamer. This is free and open source software.
Installation
I evaluated Ratic with CachyOS, an Arch-based Linux distribution.
The easiest way to install Ratic on Linux is to use the Flatpak, so you should be able to easily install the software whatever distro you prefer.
In Operation
The application focuses on handling music libraries efficiently while offering a modern desktop interface.
The first thing I check out is whether a music player supports gapless playback. That’s the ability to play consecutive audio tracks seamlessly, without any audible pause, click, or silence between them. Many albums particularly live recordings, DJ mixes, classical music, and concept albums are are designed to flow continuously from one track to the next. Without gapless playback, a small delay ruins the experience. Sadly Ratic doesn’t support gapless playback.
Key Features
- Supports most music file types.
- Remains fully responsive while loading a music library.
- Lets you sort and group music by album and artist, with full-text searching.
- Offers a dynamic blurred background with light and dark modes. This changes the background to a blurred version of the cover image.
- Includes a music queue with several play modes.
- Supports MPRIS controls.
Summary
Ratic is a basic GUI music player. Sadly it doesn’t support gapless playback which in our book is an essential feature for any self-respecting music player.
Bizarrely the software doesn’t respect the order of tracks in an album, forcing them to be ordered alphabetically. I couldn’t find a way of changing that behaviour.
The UI is pretty good though. It’s well laid out and easy to navigate. There’s lots of room for improvement. For example, presentation is awkward on large displays.
The software claims low memory usage even with large collections and cover artwork. However, using our very small CC-licensed music collection, ps_mem reports memory usage is over 250MB. That’s certainly not lean.
Hopefully Ratic will improve with time. But it’s currently a long way behind many dozens of alternatives.
Website: gitlab.gnome.org/RatCornu/ratic
Support:
Developer: Rat Cornu
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Ratic is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Graphical Music Players | |
|---|---|
| Tauon Music Box | Python-based music player that's an absolute gem |
| fooyin | Customizable music player similar to foobar2000 |
| Strawberry | Music player and collection organizer originally forked from Clementine |
| Rhythmbox | Integrated music management application, originally inspired by iTunes |
| Sayonara Player | Small, clear and fast music player written in C++ |
| Audacious | XMMS-like skinnable player |
| Exaile | Music player aiming to be similar to KDE's Amarok, but for GTK+ |
| DeaDBeeF | Basic and simple player with a small footprint. |
| Clementine | Modern music player and library organiser. Inspired by Amarok |
| Lollypop | Modern music player for GNOME |
| Amarok | KDE audio player offering a wealth of features, yet intuitive to use |
| Musique | Small but sophisticated graphical music player |
| Cantata | Feature-rich client for Music Player Daemon |
| Quod Libet | GTK+-based music management program |
| GogglesMM | Polished music collection manager and player |
| Aqualung | Advanced, gapless Gtk2-based audio player |
| MusicPod | Music, podcast and internet radio player |
| gmusicbrowser | Music jukebox for large collections |
| Yarock | Qt music player with browsing based on cover art |
| qoob | A foobar-like music player |
| GNOME Music | Simple music player |
| Pragha | Distinguished and resplendent open source music player |
| Deepin Music | Visually attractive and simple music player |
| Musicalypse | Music player and server built with Web technologies |
| Melody | Music player designed for elementary OS |
| Elisa | Simple music player developed by the KDE community |
| QMPlay2 | Video and audio player which can play most formats and codecs |
| Tomahawk | Qt-based music player |
| mtoc | Visually-rich music player and library browser |
| Kalorite | Lightweight audio player |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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