10 Best Linux Audio players
Featuring 10 of the Best Linux Audio players. Would appreciate your feedback through comments :>
1- Rhythmbox:
Rhythmbox is an great audio application for linux. It’s free of cost and it can play and organize digial music easily. It’s inspiration comes from Apple iTunes and it worked pretty amazing under the GNOME Desktop while using the GStreamer media framework.â€
Rythmbox Features:
* Easy to use music browser
* Searching and sorting
* Comprehensive audio format support through GStreamer
* Internet Radio support including last.fm streams
* Playlists
* Display audio visualizations
* Transfer music to and from iPod, MTP, and USB Mass Storage music players
* Display album art and song lyrics downloaded from the internet
* Play, rip, and burn audio CDs
* Automatically download audio podcasts
* Browse, preview, and download albums from Magnatune and Jamendo
Official Rythmbox Website
Download Rythmbox:
2- GMPC (Gnome Music Player Client):GMPC is a nice frontend for Music Player Daemon. It’s fast and easy to use, while still making optimal use of all the functions in mpd.
Features:
* Metadata support, it can show artist image, album art, lyrics, etc.
* Plugin support.
* Fast, gmpc is optimized to work even on low end machines and slow networks.
* Profile support, easily use gmpc with multiple mpd’s.
Download
Screenshots
Official Website
3- XMMS (The X Multimedia System):
XMMS (X MultiMedia System) is a great multimedia player which works on almost all systems but it has some special items which only works in Linux. XMMS can play media files such as MP3, MOD’s, WAV and others with the use of Input plugins. It’s a free software audio player very similar to Winamp,†‬that runs on many Unix-like operating
systems.
4- Amarok:
Amarok is another great music player for Linux and Unix. Amarok’s interface is very intuitive. It’s a free music player for GNU/Linux and works with UNIX as well. Right now, Amarok is the most popular audio player for Linux.
Download
Official Website
5- Quod Libet
Quod Libet is a GTK+ based audio player, it’s main feature is it’s music library management. Instead of categorizing the songs by genre, artist, and album, you can search and display instead. Quod Libet can support huge music libraries compared to any other audio players for linux out there.
Download
Official Website
6- Audacious:Audacious is a free media player for Linux or Linux based systems. Supporting immense portion of its features to plugins, including all codecs. With Audacious, On most systems, a useful set of plugins is installed by default, giving you the ability toplay MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files etc.
Features
Download
Official Website
7- Exaile:
Exaile is a free software audio player for Unix-like operating systems that aims to be similar to KDE’s Amarok, but based on the GTK+ toolkit instead of the Qt toolkit Amarok uses.
Features include:* Automatic fetching of album art
* Handling of large music libraries
* Lyrics fetching
* Artist and album information via Wikipedia
* bidirectional last.fm support (both scrobbling of played songs and retrieving related songs from the last.fm server)
* Optional iPod support (requires python-gpod)
* Optional MTP player support (requires libmtp and pymtp)
* Optional iTunes DAAP music sharing support
* Built in shoutcast directory browser
* Tabbed play lists
* Blacklisting of tracks from the music library
8- Banshee:†‬
Banshee is an free audio player for GNU/Linux operating systems which uses the Helix and GStreamer multimedia platforms to play, ‬encode,†‬and decode Oggs,†‬MP3s,†‬and other formats.You can play and import audio CDs, play and synchronize music with iPods and share your music easily.†Banshee also have the capability of reporting played songs to a user’s Last.fm playlist.†Another cool feature of Banshee is that it can Rip CD’s, support podcasting, smart playlists, music recommendations, burn audio and MP3 cd’s and much more!
9- BMP (Beep Media Player)
BMP is also known as beep media player. BMP is a free audio player based on XMMS multimedia player (Mentioned above). It looks like Winamp and also supports it’s skins, including XMMS’s. BMP supports most of the audio formats that XMMS does, main difference is between plugins that these both players use.
Download
Official Website
10- Sonata:
Sonata is another elegant GTK+ Music player for MPD (Music player daemon). It’s a free software with features like
* Expanded and collapsed views
* Automatic remote and local album art
* User-configurable columns
* Automatic fetching of lyrics
* Playlist and stream support
* Support for editing song tags
* Popup notification
* Library and playlist searching
* Audioscrobbler (last.fm) support
* Multiple MPD profiles
* Keyboard friendly
* Support for multimedia keys
* Commandline control
Update: I already dedicated a full post to SongBird in past 
– Check it out Here
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50 Comments
To read this it takes nearly 10 min but to write this type of collection needs hours of research.Great work Moin…
where is songbird or Listen?… this is a list of worst players I would say.
Thanks, Sid. Appreciate it.
I use sonata, it’s a very googd music player.
Thanks for this
Why didn’t you include BMPx, which in my opinion is the best audio player for Linux. Here’s my review of it:
http://seethisnowreadthis.com/2007/12/15/bmpx-hotter-than-your-average-media-player/
I wanted to include BMP and BMPx but I had 10 in mind and it filled up
– Hopefully, I’ll get a full list of what’s available (everything) next time and get it up! Tbanks for the mention, though.
MoiN
sooooongbiiiirrd
SongBird +1000
Thanx !!
Isn’t BMP outdated? Last version release was in 2005.
I just started using Listen. Not the most feature filled as far as ripping/burning(nonexistent)
However, the interface is perfect for what I like. The full mode includes an Amarok style now playing queue system so you can pick the next few songs before the one you’re listening to has ended. In player Lyrics, Wikipedia tab.
I recommend giving it a try.
I am going to try Sonata, sounds interesting and along the same lines as Listen.
The best mp3 player for Linux are:
Lien Mp3 Player
http://lienmp3.sourceforge.net
and
mplayer
They will run on an arm processor or or core duo. That’s what Linux is all-about.
Thanks for the list. I currently use, and am more than satisfied with Amarok, but will try some of your suggestions. Thats why I love Linux, it’s fun to play with.
No problem
I don’t know why but sometimes songbird get error on my ubuntu
I use Exaile now
No mention of Listen in the list?
http://www.listen-project.org/
Noatun is good too
I was quite disappointed with most of those players.
Amarok is ok but it has an entire sql base underneath which makes it slow and often crash.
I found Juk to be pretty nice, it’s lightweight, fast and even has a tag guesser.
hehehe great top 10. But, I think XMMS should not be there.
First of all, is not maintained anymore. It’s a very buggy audio player, and as you mentioned here, there are 2 very good alternatives: BMP and Audacious. There are exactly the same, but with no crappy GTK graphics, better gnome integration, winamp 2 skin integration, lot of plugins etc…
Exaile is my favourite. I use it all the time. Awesomeness!
Songbird… seems to be a new big player…
Songbird is to damned slow
of course, there is VLC, which plays most audio / video formats, and still does visualizations. its the swiss army knife of video / sound and should be in everyone’s toolkit.
Songbird!
Hey awesome blog! Know anyone who would be interested in part time admin’ing a Linux box? Hit me up!
Hey nice artice..thanks.
A small request..can you compare these media players on the basis of memory usage ? memory footprint that is ..
At least, please tell me which one uses minimum memory..i just want to play mp3..i just need a playlist feature thats all..
Thanks in advance
@Shrinath K you should try gmusicbowser. It´s too fast managing lage playlist. and it doesn´t use lot of ram
I will try sonata and listen.
Songbird is too slow
Without the presence of VLC I’d have abandoned Linux entirely… for having no decent audio player. And VLC is more like an ultimate app for single / video files, not someone’s last resort for an audio player with a convenient playlist ui (ie not VLC).
Kaffeine was the only app intelligent enough to list what it lacked in order to play mp3s, others are either vague or silent. But having dealt with the codecs.. Rhythmbox can’t even skip/jump through music (makes you realise how dreamy Windows is). Same for Totem. Audacious is… vegetative – is it meant to do something? Amarok, which drags half of kde with it but I could deal, never picked up on gstreamer or xine. Might give it another chance in actual kde.
To anyone who’s happy with their player, only to then have a problem with low maximum volume, try installing a mixer for one of Linux’s generic audio drivers (alsa/pulseaudio), you may find additional volumes set mid-way. (Even with all volumes at max it’s not impressive…)
Thumbs up for Quod Libet if you are an Ubuntu user… The only audio player that can manage a large music collection, fast and stable. I tried them all: Rhythmbox (can’t load a large collection, too many folders missing), Amarok (nice looks, too slow, crappy playback and mutes flash sound in firefox), Exaile(quits sometimes for no apparent reason), Audacious(what am I supossed to do with this?), Juk(is not on the list but it has the same problem as Rhythmbox)… Haven’t checked Sonata, Banshee, BMP or GMPC, I don’t know what to tell you there, I’m happy with Quod Libet, the only audio player with an original idea: “Are you tired of audio players telling you how to organize your music collection?”. – Yes, I am.
For playing or organising a large collection of music, I always use the brilliant Songbird. For a default player, VLC can’t be beaten.
What is even more useful to me, is that both programs run great on both Windows XP, and Linux, so everything is familiar and easy to use.
SONGBIRD beats them all.
Try it. It has plenty of addons can be entirely customized.
This post is over a year and a half old. You may want to check later in this blog to see if there is new information relevant to your comment.
maaghia
Thanks for Exile info !!!
I’m loving this player. Nice option under gnome!
Songbird is the best !!
This post is over a year and a half old
While Amarok appears bloated on Gnome,its is perfect for the KDE users.Audacious and Songbird win the battle for me!While Linux players are right on top in music tasks,internet synchronisation and ripping.burning facilites, they can do with better and more intuitive interface designing,on the lines of songbird,Foobar 2000 and Amarok.
Could you review new linux plyaer foobnix ? (www.foobnix.com)
thank you for your informations , i like the website very much
Nice Site You Got Here!Very Informative. Highly Recommended!
Thanks!