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Add to SafariWhen comparing gmusicbrowser vs Sayonara, the Slant community recommends Sayonara for most people. In the question“What are the best audio players for UNIX-like systems?” Sayonara is ranked 7th while gmusicbrowser is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Sayonara is:
It is so flexible it respects your local theme, or can be set to a theme, very slick, independent dark mode. And yes, it does show your cover art!
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Great with large libraries
This program uses a tagging system to help you find the music you're looking for, and can even help find duplicates. It will also automatically sync with a folder, meaning you don't have to manually initiate a scan.
Pro Cool AutoTagger
The smartest auto tagger out there. It has an intelligent regular expression system to tag the files based on the filename contents. If the name contains something like Band -Album - Track -Title www.download.mp3, the system lets you filter the metadata fields.
Pro Large assortment of layouts
You can pretty much emulate your favorite media player layout inside of gmusicbrowser as it has a large assortment of pre-made layouts as well as an insurmountable amount of options for custom layouts.
Pro Remembers playing/pause status even after restart
With most other options, you have to start the player, wait a few seconds, then click Play. Gmusicbrowser spares you the wait and plays music automatically upon startup (if you were playing music when you closed it previously).
Pro Intelligent auto playlists
Automatically generated playlists with the criteria you decide. Great for big collections.
Pro Looks really cool, and does have cover art
It is so flexible it respects your local theme, or can be set to a theme, very slick, independent dark mode. And yes, it does show your cover art!
Pro Closes to panel while playing...
It closes to the icon (tray) on your panel, while it keeps playing. Clicking the icon you can open it again, or pause/ stop/ play it there. Great to get it out of your way when you're working with cool sounds in the background.
Pro Does conky...
If you are one of those who like to close your player to panel and see what it plays in your conky?
Sayonara can do that over dbus, whether you like just artist and title, a progress bar, or even the cover art in your conky.
Pro Many plugins standard
Has many plugins out of the box, e.g. internet "radio"streams, equaliser, sprectrum analyser, bookmarks, audio converter, broadcast, playlists, lyrics for the song you're playing, and more. It's the full music enjoyment experience. If you like minimalistic, Sayonara can do that too.
Pro Sorts by the users options
Has everything you may need onboard.
Cons
Con It won't install on Linux Mint 21
Con Held back by performance issues
Can be very slow, uses a lot of resources, and has a decent amount of lag when going between songs.
Con Doesn't support media keys
Con Unusual keyboard shortcuts
Space does not pause, for instance. This would have been useful, as hitting the space bar is easier than finding the play/pause button - most music players use the space bar in this fashion.
Con Some plugins are outdated
Several plugins works on older versions of libraries no longer available for recent distros.
Con Poor library management
Initial load may have issue skipping parts of ones library, re-scanning may not resolved the issue. It also may tax ones CPU quite a lot, during these load attempts.
Con No WMA support
For those with older libraries that may still have unconverted WMA files, this can be a non-starter.
Con Large assortment of features and layouts may be confusing
Some people may find all of gmusicbrowsers layout and options daunting to figure out.
Con Playlist driven play back
If you install Sayonara, hook it up with your music directory, and want to have it play by clicking a music file and let you surprise yourself with its shuffle... it won't. It will play that double clicked song, but then just plain stop untill you double click that next one. To have it just play through your collection, you first have to make a playlist, and only then let Sayonara play that (randomly). No deal breaker, but certainly an non-intuitive hassle preventing "click that in my library, play and don't bother me no more".
Con Dynamic playback
Sayonara works with a dynamic mode shuffle method, that quite often eliminates any surprises and comes with "the same" suggestions when your collection is smaller. It can be switched off though (bottom left switches, under your playlist) if you don't like it. All the options will require you to "look into it" though, since it is somewhat confusing...
