Gnome Music vs cmus
When comparing Gnome Music 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 Gnome Music is ranked 37th. The most important reason people chose cmus is:
CLI makes Cmus clean, fast and minimalist.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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 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 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 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 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.
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 album art
cmus does not display album art
Con CLI only
No graphical interface is available for cmus. Everything is done through CLI (command line interface).
Con Difficult to use
Cmus uses odd keyboard shortcuts such as "C" to pause, "E" to add songs to queue, and "4" to edit the queue.