When comparing Music Player Daemon vs DeaDBeeF, the Slant community recommends DeaDBeeF for most people. In the question“What are the best audio players for UNIX-like systems?” DeaDBeeF is ranked 2nd while Music Player Daemon is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose DeaDBeeF is:
DeadBeef has a lot of different plugins users can use to customize the interface, controls, and options.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Multiple frontends available
MPD is a music player server that requires a separate client for user interaction. There are many frontends available, with the most popular being ncmpcpp.
Pro Features provide a good music experience
While mostly bare-bones, Music Player Daemon does include a few features which help make it perform well. Buffer support ensures that your music continues to play without interruption even when your system is under an extremely heavy (but temporary) load, gapless playback starts loading a song just before it's needed so that it's ready to play the instant the last song ends. Meanwhile, crossfading allows your songs to blend into one another for continuous playback.
Pro Easy to use with various outputs
Pro A lot of plugins
DeadBeef has a lot of different plugins users can use to customize the interface, controls, and options.
Pro Lightweight
DeadBeef uses few system resources, making it great for low end systems and for those requiring a media player that uses as few resources as possible.
Pro Extremely customizable
DeaDBeef has support for title formatting scripting, like foobar2000, which allows you to customize group patterns, the converter output, the window titles, etc. to your needs. DeaDBeeF also has a Design Mode, which allows you to add new widgets to the interface and move/delete existing ones.
Pro Uses GTK2 or GTK3
Users are able to choose a GTK2 or GTK3 build of the application to use within DeaDBeeF.
Pro ALSA plugin allows bit-perfect pipeline to DAC
Pro Supports single-album CUE files
Pro Smooth and easy
Pro Offers a ReplayGain scanner out-of-the-box
Cons
Con Not a music player, only a music server
You know how you need your browser (Firefox, Chrome, etc.) to access web pages? The browser is what YOU touch, see, and interface with, but in order for it to give you anything it must connect to a server that "serves" appropriate content. mpd is the server in this analogy, NOT the thing you actually use. The front-ends that are available for mpd, now those are music players.
Con May not conform to how you organise your library
MPD expects you to have all your music in a single folder (music_directory
) and use symbolic links to retrieve other resources.
Con Poor tagging support
Does not support enough tag types.
Con Requires a refresh every time you add music
MPD won't automatically refresh it's library - if you add music to your music folder, you will have to manually tell MPD to refresh or else it won't add the new music.
Con shuffle mode doesn't play an entire huge playlist (over 25 days)
Con GTK-App
So there is basically no integration into non-GTK desktops.
Con Terrible GUI
stop reinventing (ugly) guis. play music and get out of my way.
Con Fails when opening a CUE file
Doesn't work even after 30 minutes of tweaking. Not as good as Audacious.
Con Ubuntu's sound menu buttons don't work
DeaDBeeF shows up in the sound menu; however, clicking the next/previous buttons doesn't do anything.
Con Not as many options as other players
When it comes to options DeaDBeef may not have as many as other more prominent music playing applications.
Con Clunky
I've seen people showing lyrics - but I can't figure out how to make that work.
It's very difficult to use the 'design' function (unlike Guayadeque) to re-arrange and design the interface beyond something like a music list and artwork...