Five of the Best Linux Audio Players

Linux has a large selection of music players and library organizers available. Here’s a list of five of the best:

Amarok

Amarok makes use of core components from the K Desktop Environment, but is released independently of the central KDE release cycle. Amarok’s tagline is “Rediscover Your Music”, and its development is based around this ideology.

Features include the unique “context browser”, integrated Wikipedia lookup and song lyrics download. Amarok also features integration with last.fm, giving users suggestions about what to listen to next and which artists may fit their mood, as well as with Magnatune, allowing no-cost full listening of all the music in their catalog, and DRM-free purchasing. It can also be used to organize a library of music according to genre, artist, and album, can edit tags, associate album art, attach lyrics, and automatically assign ratings to music as it is played.

The next release of Amarok, version 2.0, is currently in development. It will make use of KDE 4 technologies like Phonon for audio and Solid for device interaction, along with extensive use of Plasma for the interface. Amarok 2.0 will also have better integration with online services and add support for Windows and Mac OS X.

Banshee

Banshee audio player is built upon Mono and Gtk. It uses the GStreamer multimedia platform for encoding, and decoding various music formats. Helix Banshee is a version of Banshee, available in openSUSE (non-OSS media). It is based upon the Banshee core, but adds support for the Helix framework.

Banshee has a simple but powerful interface that allows you to import, organize, play, and share your music. You cab rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs. Most portable music devices are supported. Banshee also has support for podcasting, smart playlists, music recommendations, and much more.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is an audio player and digital music management application. Originally inspired by Apple’s iTunes, it is free software, designed to work well under the GNOME Desktop using the GStreamer media framework. Rhythmbox is extensively integrated with a number of external programs, services and devices. Users may create ’smart playlists,’ that are automatically updated (like a database query). Optional automatic track rating is supported.

Songbird

Songbird is developed by a group known as Pioneers of the Inevitable (with members who previously developed for Winamp), with a stated mission “to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web”. It is built on the Mozilla platform and features an in-built web browser. Users can add features and change functionality in Songbird by installing extensions and skins. It is currently under heavy developement.

Exaile

Exaile is a music player aiming to be similar to KDE’s Amarok, but for GTK+ and written in Python. It incorporates many of the cool things from Amarok (and other media players) like automatic fetching of album art, handling of large libraries, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm submission support, and optional iPod support via a plugin.

In addition, Exaile also includes a built-in SHOUTcast directory browser, tabbed playlists (so you can have more than one playlist open at a time), blacklisting of tracks (so they don’t get scanned into your library), downloading of guitar tablature from fretplay.com, and submitting played tracks on your iPod to Last.fm.

If you want to find out more about all these great music players as well as other media players for Linux, Wikipedia has a very lengthy comparison of general and technical information for a number of software media player programs. What is your favorite music player for Linux?