When comparing gmusicbrowser vs Cantata, the Slant community recommends gmusicbrowser for most people. In the question“What are the best media managers for Linux?” gmusicbrowser is ranked 7th while Cantata is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose gmusicbrowser is:
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.
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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 Fast
Since it is a front-end for mpd, queries within Cantata are lightning fast.
Pro Full-featured
Not only can it help manage a music collection but Cantata also features easily configurable dynamic playlists and support for a variety of audio-streaming sites and digital devices. Furthermore, it supports last.fm scrobbling out of the box (not common with mpd front-ends).
Pro Excellent for large libraries
Pro Excellent at tagging/renaming files
Cantata can guess tags from what's already in your music directories and it can rename files so to match tag info (if that's what you want).
Pro Easy copy to mobile
The user simply needs to right-click in order to copy an album to their phone.
Pro Artist image view for scrolling.
Pro Good lyrics support
Ok lyric support. Many songs missing and slow to load.
Pro Support for ratings
Cantata is one of the few mpd front-ends that permits ratings to be stored and queried.
Pro Customisable keyboard shortcuts
You may setup Cantata practically in any aspect to match your keyboard preferences.
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 No longer developed.
Con MPD client = tricky to setupì
MPD is known to be troublesome to get it working properly. It may be really frustrating to make it work properly thus you may find Cantata not playing your music files. Otherwise it's a great music player.