When comparing Gnome Music 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 Gnome Music is ranked 37th. 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 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 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 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 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.