When comparing Lollypop vs gmusicbrowser, 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 gmusicbrowser is ranked 19th. 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 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.
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 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.
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.