Festival For Linux

If the music player provided by default by your Linux distro is not up to your standards, or you're simply bored to the moon and back by it, then all you have to do is pick one of a million alternatives out there.

Festival is an interesting alternative, even though, it may not be to everyone's taste thanks to its somewhat "quicky" or "strange" GUI, but more on that a bit later.

It's a free, open-source, and cross-platform music player that isn't focused on blowing you away through the sheer amount of features. To quote the app's official GitHub repository, "Festival is a music player for local album collections."

Most of what Festival provides is due to Symphonia, a very practical and powerful audio decoding/demuxing/metadata library.

First of all, let's talk about Festival's strong points. We're going to skip the GUI thoughts and impressions for now, and instead focus on what this music player can do and, spoiler alert, it does almost everything right.

The main attraction of Festival is the way it handles local collections of music without intreruption. The whole music loading process is swift, fast, and very user-friendly following the basic repice of "select music directory, scan, and play music."

There are various ways to view and play albums and songs, but more importantly, the app also provides a plethora of sorting options. In the Settings section, you'll also find a few GUI configuration options including arranging the text for the titlebar, changing the accent colors, changing the GUI scaling, and so forth.

The supported audio formats include MP3, MP2, MP1, MPA, MPEG, OGG, Vorbis, Opus, WAV, AIFF, WavPack, FLAC, ALAC, AAC, and ADPCM.

Last but not least, another advantage of Festival is that it's blazing fast. I mean, don't expect it be more lightweight than the music player your system comes with by default, but it's miles faster and smoother than most web-based audio players out there.

Of course, being based on simplicity above all else, there are a couple of features that are missing, so to speak. For starters, Festival does not handle playlists and compilations. The app also doesn't provide the option to edit song and album metadata (since, you know, it's not a metadata editor).

Lastly, the elephant in the room, the GUI. Let's just say that Festival's GUI doesn't conform to modern GUI standards. Interestingly enough, that is not exactly a bad thing.

If you happen to want something different, or if you're a fan of old-school-looking GUIs, then Festival will actually be to your liking. To conlude, there's really nothing wrong with Festival's GUI, it's just that it's very different to what most modern music players have, but everything is there and works great.

Festival is a decent music player that sports a unique GUI, and enough basic features to be relevant if you want something different.