Which plugins do you like?
That's a complete new thread, Newman.
Great Question. Don't get me started on this highly frustrating topic...
I've tested dozens of media players to find one that does what I want, which is finding an album from a large series just based on the cover.
I've tried every possible way of restructuring the tags of my audio collection to make it fit the silly 'Album', 'Artist' etc structure that players use, and realized that they are less than useful. I want to select music from my library just like selecting a book from a bookshelf (that's also the fun of having beautiful cover art!).
Example: I have a bookshelf dedicated to architecture, and can immediate pick the book I want based on its cover (and position within the shelf), without needing to know that it was e.g. Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier, and without having to figure out if I needed to look under 'C' or 'L' or 'W'.
In album-based book libraries, I would probably find the 'Corbusier album' near 'Christie, Agatha' which obviously have nothing to do with each other.
In the music library they'd be in a different Genre, but it would be up to me to figure out every time what type of filter I would need to find the right track.
Total waste of time.
My collection is modest: 20,000 tracks in 1,500 albums, but it is impossible to browse all these on a smartphone or tablet, so I have structured them into 250 top-level folders that I use for top-down browsing.
In e.g. a Frederic Chopin folder (under 'F' rather than 'C' because I want it that way) there is an Etudes folder that has a dozen different performers. With an Album/Artist filter approach I would never be able to find these performers together (unless doing a complete overhaul of my library by creating playlists for every folder, which will take weeks).
In my view, the library view should be able to follow the user preference, not the other way around.
I do not want to remember the name 'Kjartan Sveinsson' late in the evening after having had a beer.
I want to pick the black cover of his album within e.g. a 'Contemporary Music' folder that I could have immediately found in my CD-cabinet, above the 'Modern Jazz' shelf.
If I am looking for an Alberto Ginastera track I don't want to type it in or get albums with his piano music if I'm looking for ELPs Brain Salad Surgery album cover drawn by Swiss 'Alien' artist Giger.
After testing all these different players, even those I found with help from ChatGPT, I settled for the Music Folder structure of LMS on the Pi4. It doesn't allow the type of selection that I want, but it is fairly easy to select one of my 250 top-levels folders and do the cover art selection at the level below. I have eliminated all other selection options. There's a Material Skin on the LMS that looks better, but the developer told me he couldn't implement my artwork selection at the top level due to LMS limitations.
The only players that do a better job run on Windows and Apple: WMP, iTunes, and few others.
If you let WMP manage your folder structure it will stack the cover art it finds within that folder at the top level. That is a major step forward.
Adding that capability to the likes of Roon, Foobar, Volumio, Moode, Cantate, Strawberry, Clementine, or other funny fruit players would be a piece of cake for a software developer, but for whatever reason they have not seen the light or weren't born in a age where you still selected music yourself rather than having an algorithm do that for you.
In coming weeks I will add an i7 NUC (= boxed mini-PC) that is entirely designed for audio, and a 'to be decided' stand-alone DAC, to see if WMP actually does a better job.
If not, I will continue to
harass challenge
the designers of many other media players to create an user-oriented GUI rather than IDtag-oriented.
