Greetings,

For several years, I have used the wonderful Cantata as a frontend to MPD. Sadly, the frontend stopped receiving updates in 2022 and has started to some problems with age. While I continue to use Cantata for as long as I can, I have been looking around at other music players. However, I haven’t seen anything that aims to implement some of the nice things from Cantata.

In short, a few things I have been looking for in a player:

• suitable for playing single songs, albums, full artists, custom mixes, or playlists (no hyperfocus)
• can either set a custom artist sort tag (albumartist, composer, etc.) or properly handle semicolons (or some other separator char) in tags
• semicolon tag split in general would be nice for genre handling
• powerful active queue handling (move; shuffle and sort by song, album, artist; remove duplicates; consume on play; etc)
• online lyrics search from multiple providers

Additionally, some nice-to-haves that Cantata handles:

• CD ripping
• export library to portable device (with compatibility)

Anyone have a favorite that can handle at least the shortlist of functionality I come to expect? I don’t expect specifically a frontend for MPD, but I would prefer a player that doesn’t struggle to handle a library with 10⁴ magnitude library size.