When comparing Nuvola Player 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 Nuvola Player is ranked 42nd. The most important reason people chose cmus is:
CLI makes Cmus clean, fast and minimalist.
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Pros
Pro Mpris v2 support
Nuvola supports Mpris v2 which means that there's sound menu support in most modern Linux desktop environments.
Pro Creates a native-like front-end for music streaming webapps
Nuvola Player permits the use of music streaming webapps like Amazon Cloud Player, Google Play Music, and Spotify with an interface that aims to work as much like a native desktop application as possible. It currently supports 15 music streaming services.
Pro Can be run from the command-line
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 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 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 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 Strong focus on online
Streams are nice. But what about what I want and have? Strong focus on online listening. And if that is what you want exclusively, this is bloat. Better go with something really focused, functional and SMALL.
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.