DB is quite nice. Don't know if it still supports it but back in 2017-2019 it was possible to use terminal commands to control playback, similar to what one might use a more complex tool like mpd for, which I wrapped in Picolisp to be able to easily change the music without leaving the REPL and then hooked it up to a socket for remote control over the LAN.
Most of Linux based media players, including deadbeef, can be interacted with using MPRIS, a DBus interface, and there are multiple CLIs for sending/extracting information from them. I can recommend you the one I developed: https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-ctl , but there are others.
I understand pipes and forks, I don't understand DBus, so I'll probably keep on shelling out in my personal tools. These days I also rarely use anything else than mpv on full album files and network streams/web radio.
