Linux came a long way concerning music players in the last couple of years and if in the past there were only few choices for users - XMMS has to be mentioned here - well, now there are so many players to choose from, and if most share the same features, each one provides an alternative by bringing a new feature or a different interface. This I can tell, can satisfy any user's taste.

Music players in Linux are a dime a dozen. Even if you don’t count the media players like VLC and mplayer, there are still enough that will manage and play your music collection. I’m pretty sure I’ve tried them all at this point…and I still haven’t found one I’m perfectly satisfied with.

Unlike KDE, Gnome is blessed with a lot of choice for music players. I had always ambled between different music players as I moved between Linux distributions over the years, but still I struggled to really meet my needs each time, so I thought I'd try all the major options and see which one really did suit me, having recently upgraded to Fedora 11.

As long as we have music, there will always be many players to support it. Linux is no exception, and today we’re going to look at some of the top contenders for both GNOME and KDE. Some music players may be grouped together due to their similarities.

When it comes to music players, Linux evolved heavily during the last three or four years, and new players are announced on a regular basis. I remember that in 2006, when I was starting up with Linux, there were only a few applications to choose from, like Amarok, Rhythmbox, Listen or XMMS, and a few more less popular and not so full-featured.

Amarok, Rhythmbox and Banshee are a few of the popular music players in Linux. They are great in features and have received plenty of good reviews. But what is unknown to many is that there are a lot of other music players for Linux which are also great in features, but are hidden in some corners of the world.

These players are among the top audio players for console available on Linux. Although several use only a command-line interface, several come with a nice, ncurses-based interface which makes music management easier and pleasant.

Music Applet is a small, simple GNOME panel applet that lets you control a variety of different music players from the panel. Music Applet provides easy access to information about the current song and the most important playback controls.

Ubuntu One Music Store has been in closed beta for a long time, but today it finally entered the public beta so everyone can start using the new service which is available as a plugin for Rhythmbox, the default music player in Ubuntu Lucid (but soon, other music players will also support Ubuntu One Music Store).