Here’s the Deal

Rhythmbox vs cmus

65 23

122 25

When comparing Rhythmbox vs cmus, the Slant community recommends cmus for most people. In the question“What are the best audio players for UNIX-like systems?” cmus is ranked 5th while Rhythmbox is ranked 22nd. The most important reason people chose cmus is:

CLI makes Cmus clean, fast and minimalist.

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best audio players for UNIX-like systems?

Pros

Pro
Loads of features

Rhythmbox allows you to extract CDs to MP3s while listening, and you can also burn CDs from playlists. You can listen to Last.fm and podcasts through Rhythmbox, which has support for lyrics and more.

Pro
Plugins add only the features you want

Rhythmbox has built-in support for first and third party plugins. Instead of adding a bunch of features not everyone will use, you can download just the plugins that you want.

Pro
Podcast management

Rhythmbox features built-in podcast management.

Pro
Pre-packaged!

Rhythmbox comes pre-packaged with distros like Ubuntu, so you can just start listening to your favorite music - no apt-get install!

Pro
Internet radio

Rhythmbox has built-in support for users so that they can add their own streaming audio / internet radio channels.

Pro
Reliable

Pro
Good organization

Music can be browsed by the usual artist and album, but Rhythmbox also allows for genres which aren't supported by all music players. It also has a very useful queue box.

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
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
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
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.

Ad
Cons

Con
Buggy and slow when there's a large music collection

Can't cope with a large music collection.

Con
Not crossplatform

The only bad part of RhythmBox is that I cannot install it on other OS's.

Con
No album artist field

Most other modern music players come with an Album Artist Field when sorting music. Collaboration is very common these days and often a song would feature multiple artists, but sometimes it's easier to just sort for Album Artists. It's a rather simple feature, yet Rhythmbox has repeatedly shot down its users for making that request.

Con
No folder browse/add-to-playlist view

So few music players seem to let you browse by your directory structure and add songs to a playlist that way. That's unfortunate because it's a really useful feature and eliminates the problem of mistagged music.

Con
Still no built-in equilizer

Rhythmbox has been around for a good while now and yet there is still no default built-in equalizer. An equalizer allows users to tweak the audio to their preference. It can also help compensate for hardware (for example, lots of headphones are bass heavy, but to get a more balanced sound an equalizer can tune the bass down a touch).