When comparing Music Player Daemon vs Lollypop, the Slant community recommends Lollypop for most people. In the question“What are the best audio players for UNIX-like systems?” Lollypop is ranked 12th while Music Player Daemon is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose Lollypop is:
You can view all the albums you have in one long list. Clicking on one of them will bring a popup at the bottom of the screen where you will see a list of all the songs on that album.
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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 Super intuitive way of organizing and browsing albums and artists
You can view all the albums you have in one long list. Clicking on one of them will bring a popup at the bottom of the screen where you will see a list of all the songs on that album.
Pro Works fast and reliably
Pro Super flexible layout
The latest version has a good full-screen layout and is very responsive. Goes very smoothly from full screen to minimal player (also being a GTK+ app).
Pro Integrates with the MPRIS sound menu
This applies for most players in the "Linux world", but not for all. Therefore I consider it worth mentioning.
Pro Huge development
There is constant improvements, librem and gnome3 is possibly the future.
Pro Cloud music
Lollypop allow you to play music from the web (iTunes charts and search from Spotify).
Pro Integrates well with many desktop environments
One example being the conditional use of client side decorations (a.k.a. header bars) depending on the currently active desktop environment.
Pro Good party mode
Pro Clean, light and works very well.
The only one that can play a lot of files without to stop.
Pro Queue option lets you change what's playing on the fly
You can add songs to a queue, and then re-order or remove songs as you please. It works similarly to a temporary playlist.
Pro Online radio integration
The newest version features a nice interface for adding, browsing, and playing online radio stations. This gives you access to more music than you would normally have, which can help expand your music library for free.
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 GTK App
Its a GTK app so integration in other desktops is terrible it also uses GNOMEs ClientSideDecorations so it will break many window managers.
Con No equalizer
Lollypop still does not have an equalizer.
Con Good party mode
Con No In-App Volume Control (0.9.242)
It has no in-app volume control, it has to be managed through system 'Sound control/Applications'
Con Requires a well organized music collection
Lollypop will be a pain to use if music is badly tagged. The setup is a one time thing, but it can be a pain to organize a large library.