When comparing Gnome Music vs Audacious, 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 Gnome Music is ranked 37th. 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 Simple clean and minimal interface
Pro Open source
Pro UI design consistent with GNOME desktop environment
Gnome Music is GNOME's default music player. If you use GNOME Desktop Environment, you'll feel familiar with other GNOME Apps like this one.
Pro Stable
Pro System-wide music organizer
Gnome Music automatically seeks and organises your music files throughout your system using Tracker.
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.
Cons
Con Cannot change library folder
Con Too Simplistic
It works as a simple music player with a GNOME look, but it has very few features and almost no configuration options. Too bad.
Con Buggy
Gnome Music needs a tracker daemon running in the background and that thing never loads the music. It takes forever for a huge library to be loaded even if it was previously partially loaded.
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.