When comparing Clementine vs Cantata, the Slant community recommends Clementine for most people. In the question“What are the best music players for Linux?” Clementine is ranked 2nd while Cantata is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Clementine is:
Clementine gathers the user's listening data to use for smart playlists. Clementine uses your listening history to play music similar to the music you play most - which typically is music you will like but maybe haven't discovered yet.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Creates playlists based on past music you listened to
Clementine gathers the user's listening data to use for smart playlists. Clementine uses your listening history to play music similar to the music you play most - which typically is music you will like but maybe haven't discovered yet.
Pro Decent library management
Clementine allows the user to move and organize audio files easily. Some examples include the following:
- It's easy to find a specific album song (find artist, select album, select song).
- It's easy to add songs to a playlist and queue the songs.
- It's easy to rename files from their metadata (artist, album, song number, etc).
- It's easy to add cover images.
- There are options to find duplicates, untagged songs, etc.
Pro Sensible UI
A fork of the 1.X line of Amarok, Clementine favours usability over design trends.
Pro Intuitive and fast to set up
Clementine is easy to get up and running with lyrics, equalizer, online info, etc., within minutes after installation.
Pro Remote app for Android
There is a very good remote app for Android. The app lets you do a lot: from the usual volume controls to checking the lyrics on your phone. You can even download the songs from Clementine onto your phone.
Pro Supports a lot of online services
Clementine includes support for services such as Ampache, Google Play Music, Spotify, and many internet radio stations such as Jamendo and Icecast. It's also possible to search all available sources (local and online) at once, as well as mixed content playlists.
Pro Tag editing
Clementine features competent tag managing for all music files, be it album art or just simple text entries.
Pro Built-in equalizer for custom sound
There is a built-in equalizer with many presets from genre-specific rock, pop, and party, to experiences such as large hall and live. You can also tweak it yourself and name your own preset.
Pro Can display song lyrics
Fetches lyrics from several lyric providers.
Pro Built-in format conversion
Users can format any of their music files to a different format with Clementine's built-in format conversion tool.
Pro Very good folder organization
Organizes your music folder based on the tags of your library.
Pro Looks Good and is really Responive
Unlike some other players in this list, Clementine doesn't seem to go unresponsive in the Ubuntu 16.04 system and looks really good with options for Visualization too.
Pro Fast
Since it is a front-end for mpd, queries within Cantata are lightning fast.
Pro Full-featured
Not only can it help manage a music collection but Cantata also features easily configurable dynamic playlists and support for a variety of audio-streaming sites and digital devices. Furthermore, it supports last.fm scrobbling out of the box (not common with mpd front-ends).
Pro Good lyrics support
Pro Support for ratings
Cantata is one of the few mpd front-ends that permits ratings to be stored and queried.
Pro Excellent for large libraries
Pro Easy copy to mobile
The user simply needs to right-click in order to copy an album to their phone.
Pro Customisable keyboard shortcuts
You may setup Cantata practically in any aspect to match your keyboard preferences.
Pro Excellent at tagging/renaming files
Cantata can guess tags from what's already in your music directories and it can rename files so to match tag info (if that's what you want).
Cons
Con Slow development
Very little development work has been going on for a while as of mid-2017. Nobody is responding to bug reports.
Con Resource exhaustive
Clementine uses up to two orders of magnitude more CPU than VLC and takes up about 180 MB of memory, plus additional memory for spawned processes (tag-readers), while VLC uses 80 MB with no other processes.
Con Bit perfect output no longer configurable
Audiophiles want to play their expensive HD albums.
Con Default settings aren't great
Although this is subjective, you might have to do some tweaking before you like it.
Con Buggy
Clementine is probably the most fully featured music player for Linux, however it has its own issues. It crashes and experiences occasional memory leaks that can slow down your system.
Con Not a lot of documentation
Clementine does not offer a lot of documentation, which can make discovering its features a bit difficult.
Con Cannot choose which tag profile to use
I use Tag2 (ID3:2.4) which doesn't seem to be the default tag used and I can't see a way to choose this.
Con Doesn't allow gapless playback
Con Last.fm support is broken
Con No way to search on filename
Con Database regularly messes up
Con Horrible user interface and confusing layout
Con Too bloated by default with things like LastFM that can't be removed
When you install it, you get ton of internet radios and services plugins, that you can't remove, only turn off. There is also useless stuff like artist info that doesn't work and stuff.
Con Not customizable
It doesn't allow you to modify its interface by dragging toolbars around etc.
Con Sometimes messes up taskbar
Con Slow to start in Gnome/Cinnamon
It takes about the same time to start as an IDE or Photoshop.
Con MPD client = tricky to setup
MPD is known to be troublesome to get it working properly. It may be really frustrating to make it work properly thus you may find Cantata not playing your music files. Otherwise it's a great music player.