When comparing Audacious vs Music Player Daemon, the Slant community recommends Audacious for most people. In the question“What are the best audio players for UNIX-like systems?” Audacious is ranked 1st while Music Player Daemon is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose Audacious is:
Audacious is a classic music player at heart that has not felt the need to weigh itself down with an assortment of unnecessary options. Advanced functionality can be attained through plugins available from within the program.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Streamlined player not weighed down by unnecessary options
Audacious is a classic music player at heart that has not felt the need to weigh itself down with an assortment of unnecessary options. Advanced functionality can be attained through plugins available from within the program.
Pro Tons of plugins
Pro Lightweight
My audacious uses only 18.5 MB of RAM. It has a Winamp visualization style that's very minimized and convenient.
Pro Support for Winamp themes
Audacious can switch from its GTK interface to one that matches the looks of the famous Winamp player. What's even better is that this interface supports any Winamp themes, which allows for more options.
Pro Folder oriented player, but able to play any music container and highly configurable
Lets you play, delete and even change metadata of your music files.
Pro The easiest player for multiple types of files
It plays dts, aac multichannel, etc.
Pro Compatibility with most media formats
It's able to reproduce most of media formats without external plugins.
Pro Multiple frontends available
MPD is a music player server that requires a separate client for user interaction. There are many frontends available, with the most popular being ncmpcpp.
Pro Features provide a good music experience
While mostly bare-bones, Music Player Daemon does include a few features which help make it perform well. Buffer support ensures that your music continues to play without interruption even when your system is under an extremely heavy (but temporary) load, gapless playback starts loading a song just before it's needed so that it's ready to play the instant the last song ends. Meanwhile, crossfading allows your songs to blend into one another for continuous playback.
Pro Easy to use with various outputs
Cons
Con No manual sorting fields
There is no option to add one's own categories to the sorting fields.
Con Updates are not very frequent
Con No bit perfect output past 24bit
Audiophiles require this, and while most users might not notice a difference, audiophiles will appreciate the improved audio quality.
Con Buggy
For example when using Visual Studio Code and Audacious you get flicked out to the gnome login screen.
Con Not a music player, only a music server
You know how you need your browser (Firefox, Chrome, etc.) to access web pages? The browser is what YOU touch, see, and interface with, but in order for it to give you anything it must connect to a server that "serves" appropriate content. mpd is the server in this analogy, NOT the thing you actually use. The front-ends that are available for mpd, now those are music players.
Con May not conform to how you organise your library
MPD expects you to have all your music in a single folder (music_directory
) and use symbolic links to retrieve other resources.
Con Poor tagging support
Does not support enough tag types.
Con Requires a refresh every time you add music
MPD won't automatically refresh it's library - if you add music to your music folder, you will have to manually tell MPD to refresh or else it won't add the new music.
