VLC vs Lollypop

VLC is licensed under the CC-SA v3.0+ and available on Windows, OSX, and Linux with source code available here.

VLC is an incredibly robust application but very simple on the surface. It makes playing music simple, yet still manages to give the user all the tools he/she wants in a music player.

Everything VLC needs to play media files is contained within which means no outside codecs are needed. This makes it one of the most hassle-free music players as it can play virtually anything as soon as it's installed.

Besides basic configurations, video player has an extensive amount of adjustable settings.

You organize your music into folders any way you want. Want to play an album? Drag and drop. No tags, no confusion, no fluff. Easy.

VLC includes keyboard shortcuts for most actions. The video player can be controlled with simple and customizable keyboard commands.

Yes. Lightest. Even better than the ones known to be light. Both when playing music, only a single song or when playing a video. Either in terms of Ram and Cpu. Compared with almost all, including the ones from Windows like mpc-hc .. or light ones from Linux like Alsa Player, Audacious, SmPlayer .

Blu-Ray playback support was added on July 13th, 2014. It allows playing back DRM-free Blu-Rays with the help of libbluray, libaacs and libbdplus.

Using sftp/ssh music (and videos) can be streamed from any server on the network to any device running VLC. VLC can also be used as a webcam for streaming and snapshots. Amazing all in one package

VLC has a large amount of extensions.

You can view all the albums you have in one long list. Clicking on one of them will bring a popup at the bottom of the screen where you will see a list of all the songs on that album.

The latest version has a good full-screen layout and is very responsive. Goes very smoothly from full screen to minimal player (also being a GTK+ app).

This applies for most players in the "Linux world", but not for all. Therefore I consider it worth mentioning.

There is constant improvements, librem and gnome3 is possibly the future.

Lollypop allow you to play music from the web (iTunes charts and search from Spotify).

One example being the conditional use of client side decorations (a.k.a. header bars) depending on the currently active desktop environment.

The only one that can play a lot of files without to stop.

You can add songs to a queue, and then re-order or remove songs as you please. It works similarly to a temporary playlist.

The newest version features a nice interface for adding, browsing, and playing online radio stations. This gives you access to more music than you would normally have, which can help expand your music library for free.