When comparing Cantata vs Sayonara, the Slant community recommends Sayonara for most people. In the question“What are the best media managers for Linux?” Sayonara is ranked 3rd while Cantata is ranked 10th. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
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 Sorts by the users options
Has everything you may need onboard.
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.
Cons
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.
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...