There is at least one good radio station I know streaming classical music. No need to sell your soul.

I don't know how much I saw this late.
Have you tried Tauon Music Box?

Listen n stream, radio, tracks everything with multi gui modes, It's easy.
Give it a try

I found mocp's startup time far too slow and IIRC it kept crashing on large playlists (50K+) so I just wrote my own[1] based on a multi-process design[2]. I run it on a file server I setup under my amplifier and it plays music every hour of every day mostly from EDM internet radio "recordings", and basically only stops when i reboot the computer. Uses ffmpeg's libraries to decode and volume-normalise the signal, has web/cli/keyboard (web is an embedded server in C, hardcoded to mele airmouse) control, shuffle, a basic search, uses lmdb as an index, and is ALSA only.

Once I got it playing music with a shuffle list for weeks on end I didn't really do much more work on it. I poke at it every now and then but i'm too burnt out to give a rats arse about fleshing it out or prettying it up. I've got some uncommited work on playlists and play queues but I'm unhappy with the complexity of the design and the behaviour and can't be bothered trying to come up with a better one and finish off the code. It's all work in progress as they say.

Apart from the volume normalisation filter which is a bit cpu intensive it has a tiny cpu and memory footprint and runs well on small ARM boards. I've got some old ARM machines and was going to set one up as a portable 'boom box' thing running off lithium battery packs that let you insert usb drives to auto-index/play but once I setup the PC I couldn't be bothered with that project. Actually that was the reason I started the project and the spare PC become file-server-music-player came later.

[1] https://code.zedzone.space/cvs?p=playerz&a=tree
[2] https://www.zedzone.space/post/016865f8b907

Strawberry....Clementine refined

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i remember some quite arrogant comments from a Clementine developer concerning support for something else than pulse.

Got VMware player for any serious track manipulation.
Because well, only turntable I find for linux is terminatorX and that is way outperformed by OTS even free version OTS is way better.
And I normally listen to qmmp, which is mostly good but LACKS a loop plugin (I don't think anyone has written one yet).
So qmmp's fine if I want to hear some new tracks, but if I want to loop samples only thing I've found is foo_rehearsal from github.
And that thing sadly only works in foobar2000, so I use WINE/WindowsXP in VMware or whatever.

Elisa (one of the KDE apps) is also included in a default Slackware installation. Though I mostly listen to music on my phone with AIMP, a music player and Newpipe, a Youtube frontend.

XMMS, probably 20 years now. I'll likely just switch over to Audacious when it stops working.
I also use a variety of the CLI programs, if X is unavailable. Some of these can be used in combination with espeak for enunciation of audio file titles when playing an entire directory of them.

I recently tried elisa while investigating the new kde. it shows promise, but unfortunately it doesn't do gapless playback, which is a must have for me, so I'll be sticking with my old-school methods.

I use audacious with a random-play script:

#!/bin/sh

export IFS=$'\n'
x=$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S)
find /a3/mp3-1 -type f -name "*.mp3" -print | sort -R > /tmp/.$x.m3u
if [ -s /tmp/.$x.m3u ]
then audacious /tmp/.$x.m3u >/dev/null 2>&1 &
fi

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I was always a big fan of amarok -back in qt4 days.
My qt5 era favourite is strawberry. Great for music collection, great sound.
Second comes audacious.
I like vlc's sound but i am using it mostly for videos.
And moc was - and is - always among my selections.
(i prefer to use alsa for sound, above gui players are offering an easy to select this)

Clementine or Audacious but whatever I'm using it's always from a read-only NFS mount to stop anything from writing to the files and if that breaks the player then it's a good save!

I am enjoying sitting under the speakers on the back verandah on a balmy evening queuing up some mouldy oldies using my phone to access the web interface to Kodi.

I often use for listening from headless console, runlevel 3 before startx. If I'm not watching a movie or looking at photos, I prefer runlevel 3, because it, in and of itself, is an affective ad blocker: surfing the web from within emacs (with eww), usually delivers the content without the images getting in the way, and most of the clickbait is image-driven; I am more productive in runlevel 3, lol.

I create executible launchers for my most common sources, like kmhd, portland's jazz radio, and then install them to a binary location within my $PATH: thus all I have to do is type kmhd at the console, and away it plays. The launcher first kills any ffplay processes if there are any, to stop what I was listening to, and then launch new process with new source.

Compiling binaries for streaming radio stations without x11 or wayland is really just a book mark system--of course they all work within x11 too, they just don't depend on it.

I also use them as alarm clocks, like if I have to be at the school bus on time and I need an alarm 3 hours from now