When comparing Rhythmbox vs Music Player Daemon, the Slant community recommends Music Player Daemon for most people. In the question“What are the best audio players for UNIX-like systems?” Music Player Daemon is ranked 16th while Rhythmbox is ranked 22nd. The most important reason people chose Music Player Daemon is:
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.
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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 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 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).
Con Crashes often when there's a large music collection
Con No CUE file support
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.