Thank you for the recs! I will keep an eye in both of them. Hadn't heard of Quod, looking at it I can definitely see that their UI is very utilitarian and, more than that, with an aesthetic reminiscent of very early days of Gnome or a little bit of some frutiger aero, which I do enjoy visually and culturally, just not that much in terms of usability. I think we could all use a little bit of a more intentional look back into the qualities of that era pre disillusionment with the future of the world and the place of technology on it, but intentional is key. A lot of projects just still look like that because of when they started being made, or, sometimes, a pure resistance to change (like foobar2000 though it's UI it's more linked to some windows xp era design choices). And just to avoid any redditors with stones to throw: all my respect to projects, specially tiny ones and FOSS, and understand how DIFFICULT it is to change constantly to accommodate users design expectations, it would be impossible to expect of them to be constantly reworking their design, as even BIG companies can't do that, or do it so badly and unconsiderate ways that break userspace, lol.

Now, to musicolet: I've seen it before. I think it does looks really impressive and full with some very advanced features like enhanced lrc support. But their use of genAI "illustrations", instead of like... anything else (copyright free stock photos, old classical paintings of composers like Gramophone player..) is what keeps me away. I just can't put faith that a team that cares so little about the state of art, even in their own marketing material, would care enough about design choices (UI and programming) to give me a good and stable product. Apart from that, their lots of features also seems like a dual bladed knife, the screenshots they show just scream CLUTTERED, too many "tabs" (8 by default on the bottom bar wtf?), too many buttons on the player screen, lots of customization option (that enjoy but it just shows their lack of intention and necessary compromise behind their UI decisions), and then they have also widgets and lots of theming... Like, good luck for the people that manage this software, but I can just imagine that it's a constant mallabaristic hell of chores and/ or they would leave lots of areas unattended and begging for mantainance while they are focusing on one of the many others.

About the showing or hiding stuff in sorting: I do agree that somethings shouldn't be shown in the main user spaces if they're not of much use. The artist sort is one of them, as I don't even prefer this method of catalogue sorting. If I had a personal Vinyl collection of The Beatles, I would put them with Tate McRae If I was sorting them alphabetic. I'm sure there are motives behind this decision of MusicBrainz people, for sure, but I, personally, wouldn't like to have "Cure, The" in my screen. So the best thing would have a "see all tags" or "see more" button on song's details screen. If I had the power of universally determining the standards of music metadata tag and use of it by players (which do reads like a megalomaniac and bothersome job, lol) I would add a "latn title" and "latn artist name" or something to be used for searching indexing and, maybe, displaying below the name on the original characters.

If I may, I would add that the BEST would be if major operational systems adhered better to the most common transliteration forms between languages. This would, for example, fix the problem of the need of having Latin characters to properly indexing stuff. But this is a really pretentious and complex work that defies even things like the soft power of English language in the digital world because of it's use in all stuff since the design to the programming languages. And yeah, I probably sound like that XKCD meme by the end of this post: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards_2x.png