When comparing cmus vs gmusicbrowser, 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 gmusicbrowser is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose cmus is:
CLI makes Cmus clean, fast and minimalist.
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Pros
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.
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.
Cons
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.
Con Can't play wavepack files
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.