Review of ten most popular Linux applications. 1. Amarok - Audio Player

I used this player for about three years and I love it more and more, with each new release. Statistics show around 60% of the Linux users prefer Amarok over any other audio player. 60%! That's huge. This article lists 7 reasons for which I think this is the most loved audio player. I preferred to leave out the more technical ones, and just concentrate on the highlights.

Qmmp (Qt Multimedia Player) is a Qt-based audio player for Linux which resembles the appearance of XMMS (and Audacious for that matter), so users of these two players which want to have a player which integrates well in KDE will probably want to give it a try.

XMMS is a player which the new generation of Linux users have seem to forgotten. For the Linux users who are just adjusting with the new KDE/Gnome interface and still are not ready to leave their favourite player WINAMP, this is for you. XMMS is a very light song player which will open up in your first click and thus unlike the heavy players like Songbird

Audacious is a powerful audio player for Linux which resembles the older XMMS, only using GTK2 toolkit for its interface. It supports XMMS and implicitly Winamp 2.x skins, coming with support for various audio formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or WMA (Windows Media Audio).

Amarok is a very decent audio player. If you would like to organize your music than Amarok will definitely help you out. You can add, edit playlists, add album art, lyrics and sort songs by artist or genre.

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.

"Decibel Audio Player is available in Debian unstable/testing and Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon repositories (package decibel-audio-player)."

I'm not that picky when it comes to desktop audio player. Typically, I just use whatever audio player that comes with my Linux distro. As long as it plays all of my audio files (with the right plugins of course), I'm good. Until most recently, when I've tried those iTunes replacements that I wrote about a while ago, I've discovered Songbird, and it quickly became my favorite audio player.