When comparing Cantata vs Rhythmbox, the Slant community recommends Cantata for most people. In the question“What are the best media managers for Linux?” Cantata is ranked 10th while Rhythmbox is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Cantata is:
Since it is a front-end for mpd, queries within Cantata are lightning fast.
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 Loads of features
Rhythmbox allows you to extract CDs to MP3s while listening, and you can also burn CDs from playlists. You can listen to Last.fm and podcasts through Rhythmbox, which has support for lyrics and more.
Pro Plugins add only the features you want
Rhythmbox has built-in support for first and third party plugins. Instead of adding a bunch of features not everyone will use, you can download just the plugins that you want.
Pro Podcast management
Rhythmbox features built-in podcast management.
Pro Pre-packaged!
Rhythmbox comes pre-packaged with distros like Ubuntu, so you can just start listening to your favorite music - no apt-get install
!
Pro Internet radio
Rhythmbox has built-in support for users so that they can add their own streaming audio / internet radio channels.
Pro Reliable
Pro Good organization
Music can be browsed by the usual artist and album, but Rhythmbox also allows for genres which aren't supported by all music players. It also has a very useful queue box.
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 Buggy and slow when there's a large music collection
Can't cope with a large music collection.
Con Not crossplatform
The only bad part of RhythmBox is that I cannot install it on other OS's.
Con No album artist field
Most other modern music players come with an Album Artist Field when sorting music. Collaboration is very common these days and often a song would feature multiple artists, but sometimes it's easier to just sort for Album Artists. It's a rather simple feature, yet Rhythmbox has repeatedly shot down its users for making that request.
Con No folder browse/add-to-playlist view
So few music players seem to let you browse by your directory structure and add songs to a playlist that way. That's unfortunate because it's a really useful feature and eliminates the problem of mistagged music.
Con Still no built-in equilizer
Rhythmbox has been around for a good while now and yet there is still no default built-in equalizer. An equalizer allows users to tweak the audio to their preference. It can also help compensate for hardware (for example, lots of headphones are bass heavy, but to get a more balanced sound an equalizer can tune the bass down a touch).