When comparing Parole vs cmus, the Slant community recommends cmus for most people. In the question“What are the best media players for UNIX-like systems?” cmus is ranked 9th while Parole is ranked 24th. The most important reason people chose cmus is:
CLI makes Cmus clean, fast and minimalist.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Based on GStreamer
It's based on the GStreamer framework so it supports all GStreamer codes and plugins.
Pro CLI only
CLI makes Cmus clean, fast and minimalist.
Pro Does not use a lot of memory
Cmus only uses about 15 MB. This is a very small and light media player, which is ideal for people with low end hardware.
Pro Works very well with tags from MusicBrainz database
cmus will factor in additional data from the MusicBrainz database while sorting. For example sort orders for arist or album, and the original release date for an album (in the case of a re-release).
Pro Good library structure
A lot of music players may act more like playlist viewers rather than a music library. cmus sorts by Artist > Year > Album.
Pro Fast
A lot of music players will be slow when starting if they have huge libraries, but CMus starts fast no matter the library size.
Pro Customizable keybindings for a personal experience
You can add keybindings for just about anything - including seeking (forward/backwards 1 minute, for example) which isn't supported by all music players.
Pro No mouse required
cmus does not require a mouse as it runs in the terminal
Pro Open source extensions and scripts
On GitHub you can find the official WIKI where there are a dozen extensions and scripts from color themes to a lyrics viewer and the ability to play YouTube songs.
Cons
Con Tries to be a Audio and Video player at the same time
So it will never be the perfect audio or video player
Con Menu navigation is poor
There are no icons inside the menus which makes them very uncomfortable and slow to browse.
Con Fat
Depending on your desktop environment it could have some huge dependencies for example it needs GStreamer and its codecs plus GTK and some Xfce libaries.
Con No album art
cmus does not display album art
Con CLI only
No graphical interface is available for cmus. Everything is done through CLI (command line interface).
Con Difficult to use
Cmus uses odd keyboard shortcuts such as "C" to pause, "E" to add songs to queue, and "4" to edit the queue.