15 Linux Music Players – Download your Favorite
Posted by MoiN | Posted in Linux, Softwares | Posted on 19-10-2008
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There are a lot of great music players out there for Windows and Mac operating systems but so does Linux. Some of these players support almost anything, some don’t. Some are heavy on the system, some aren’t. I’ve compiled a list of most used Linux based music/media/audio players. The list is not in a particular order, whatever you think is your favorite, mention it in the comments :)..
1- Rhythmbox
Rythmbox is a great music management application for Linux which gives you access to a lot of nice features. Including
- 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
2- SongBird
Songbird is one of the best music application for Linux. It supports MP3, FLAC, and Vorbis on all platforms; WMA and WMA DRM on Windows; and AAC and Fairplay on Windows and Mac.
Listen project is a another nice music player for Linux which is written in Python (language). You can easily organize your music collections with ogg, flac, mpc, mp3, mp4, m4a supported. Feature of browsing different web service like:
- Shoucast Webradio
- Podcast
- Lyrics (througth many plugins like lyriki, leolyrics,… )
- Wikipedia informations about artists or albums
and with 4 different interface modes, it’s a must have.
Gnome Music Player Client also known as GMPC is fast and easy to use. The best thing about this software is that it’s optimized to run on low end machines and over slow networks while supporting and giving you access to a lot of great features like:
- File Browser
- Browser based on ID3 information
- Search
- Current playlist viewer with search
- ID3 Information
- Metadata support, it can show artist image, album art, lyrics, etc
- Profile support
- Support for loading/saving playlists
- Lots of Plugin support
5- Bmpx
BMPx is a simple to use media player for linux. You can watch the latest CNN news or listen to the BBC NewsPod. Last.fm works great with it, and almost all the files that a media player supports are supported. BMPx uses GStreamer (which is a multimedia framework used to drive BMP’s audio backend) as the playback back end and thus can play whatever GStreamer can play on your system.
6- Sonata
Sonata is another great GTK+ Music player for MPD (Music player daemon). It’s a free software with a elegant and intuitive interface for your music collection. It has a s tabbed interface which includes your current playlist, your library (browse by filesystem, artists, or albums), your saved playlists, and any streams (pls/m3u is supported). You can perform most of your actions through right-click popup menus. Features Include:
- 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
- Available in 20 languages
7- Noatun
Noatun is more simpler and faster than some. It features some nice audio effects, a variable-band graphic equalizer, a full plugin architecture, network transparency etc. Just remember before using it, Install mpeglib and the corresponding mpeglib_artsplug, (Which is a part of the kdemultimedia-package) or it will only play .Wav files.
8- Juk
Juk has an easy to use, playlist and metadata focused interface with several playlist types with other features like Player and tag Editor, multiple audio output backends, inline search, a File renamer which you can use to renames files based on the tag content, A powerful tag editor that works seemlessly with all supported music formats, A Now playing title bar, Cover Art management which is supported by Google Image search, random play etc.
Another great thing about Juk is that it has a built in CD burning support via the popular K3b tool.
9- VLC Player
VLC player, in my opinion, doesn’t need any introduction. It’s my favorite media player which plays almost every single file, whether it’s audio or video. Codecs are pre-installed so you don’t usually need to download anything. Can play MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, even HD movies as well as DVD’s, CD’s and various streaming protocols.
10 – GmusicBrowser
GMusicBrowser is another nice music player for Linux. It’s an open-source jukebox for large collections of mp3/ogg/flac/mpc files. It’s very simple to use, You can change the volume by using the mouse wheel almost anywhere on the window, set songs ratings and much more!
Main Features Include:
- Made with big (> 10,000 songs) libraries in mind (developed with over 17000 songs on a duron800)
- Customizable window layouts (see layouts documentation)
- Powerful browser which doesn’t interfere with the playlist
- Artist/album lock : easily restrict playlist to current artist/album
- Easy access to songs related to the currently playing song
- Support ogg vorbis, mp3 and flac files (and mpc with gstreamer or mplayer)
- Simple mass-tagging and mass-renaming
- Tray icon, with a very customizable tip window, which can be used to control the player
- Very customizable SongTree widget for a pretty list of songs (example)
- Fully featured tag editor (support all id3 versions, limited support for APE & lyrics3 tags)
- Support multiple genres for a song
- Support multiple artists for each song by separating them with ‘, ‘ or ‘ & ‘
- Customizable labels can be set for each song (ex : bootleg, live, -’s favorites, …)
- Filter history in the browser window
Plugins include:
- Nowplaying (to update an external program when the playing song changes)
- Last.fm
- Find pictures
- Simple lyrics
- MozEmbed : use the mozilla engine to display wikipedia artist page and search lyrics with google
11- Banshee
Banshee is another great free music player for GNU/Linux operating systems. It allows you to import Audio CD’s, synchronize your music with iPods and other devices, Stay up to date with Podcasts, check out new music at Last.FM and a lot more.
Main Features Include:
- Video Support
- Device Support
- Podcast Support
- Last.fm Streaming
- Radio Last.fm Streaming Radio
- Play Queue
- Album Art
- Artist/Album Browser
- Powerful Search
12- Amarok
Amarok is a feature rich Linux music player that has a lot to offer. It provides you with a great music catalog management system through which you can gather your CD’s together by name and artist, and organize it quite effectively. It supports Last.FM and has the ability to burn custom CD’s while using K3B as it’s back end.
The latest version (Beta of Amarok 2.0) offer features like
- Inline editing of tracks in the Collection is now possible.
- Album moves can be undone
- Grouped albums can be moved in the playlist by draggin the album header
- Track moves in the playlist can now be undone
- Gapless playback.
- New “fuzzy” bias type, which matches values loosely.
- Collection Setup automatically expands to show selected directories. (BR 123637)
- Tag editing and file deletion for MTP devices
- Add toolbox to context view
- Allow selecting multiple playlist items.
- Implement “Move to collection” functionality in file browser.
- Saving/loading of biased playlists.
- Improved script console
- Set items in directory selector to partially checked when relevant. patch by Sebastian Trueg
- Album is now added to the playlist when clicked in Albums applet.
- Trigger play/pause when middle-clicking systray icon. (BR 167162)
- New start flag –multipleinstances allows to run multiple instances of Amarok.
- Full cover support for Nepomuk collection
- Search local collection for albums to show in the album applet when playing non local content
- Context view state is saved on exit and restored on start up.
- New functions available to the scripting interface, under Amarok.Info.
13- Exaile
Exaile is a free music player of Unix like Operating systems. It aims to be similar to KDE’s Amarok, but based on the GTK+ toolkit instead of the Qt toolkit which Amarok uses. Features include:
- Automatic fetching of album art
- Handling of large music libraries
- Lyrics fetchingArtist and album information via Wikipedia
- 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
14- Audacious
Audacious is also used by a lot of Linux users because of it’s better organized playlist features. You can add actual internet streams, your music files, CD’s etc very easily. The previous versions of Audacious didn’t had a good support for other media files except for Ogg and MP3’s but they have implemented a lot of features with the help of third party plugins.
It’s still a decent music player for linux but needs more features and improvements to be the top one.
15- Quod Libet
Quod Libet is a nice media player which is designed for Gnome, written in Python and is based on GTK+. Their main goal is to give you better management towards your music while giving you access to easily scale to libraries of thousands of songs. Other features include
- Audio Playback
- Tag Editing
- Audio Library
- Internet radio (Shoutcast) support
- Audio Feed (Podcast) support
- Simple user interface
- Python Plugins
- File Formats: MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Musepack, MOD/XM/IT, Wavpack, MPEG-4 AAC
You might find some formats and other files a bit buggy while using Quid Libet but they can be easily covered by the available plugins.
Not Satisfied? Check these out.
3- KPlayer
4- Kaffeine
5- Mplayer
6- Miro
7- Muine
10- XMMS
Thank you it is a nice article with very nice informations.
Great list! Thanks a lot. I really need some alternative lightweight and user-friendly media player for some ‘public’ computers at my english course which will be using Xubuntu. =) I see some future in some of those…
Thanks for this list. I’m sure it’ll come in useful once I actually get time to play with Linux :)
nice article and all, though audacious deserves much more. it is the only player of this list supporting so many audio formats, while consuming only a fraction of RAM compared to other listed players.
and.. noatun does NOT look like winamp at all, nothing similar. audacious does.
You might want to note that Sonata and GMPC are both Music Player Daemon clients, and require it to run.
Also, there’s a learning curve (albeit a shallow one) to setting up MPD for your environment.
I had no idea there were so many things available for Linux! thats truly amazing. I think I might be ready to make the switch!
Jiff
http://www.privacy-center.be.tc
Enya? Seriously?
Amarok is the only one you need…. Nothings else for linux comes close.
15 Linux Music Players – Download your Favorite | Deliggit.com…
\r\nThere are a lot of great music players out there for Windows and Mac operat…
Very good article!
I use Amarok everyday it’s a fabulous player! VLC and Rhythmbox so.
Actually, Noatun is old and buggy. Dragon Player (http://www.dragonplayer.org/ ), developed by some Amarok and Codeine devs, is the replacement.
1725. I just scrolled thru the Add/Remove Programs list in Ubuntu, and that is how many applications it there are for me to have if I want. To install a program, I check it off, and hit OK. It then downloads from the repository, and installs itself automatically. I never have to go browsing to install something. The “download” links on this webpage are not something I would use. You can also install programs by typing a command. For example: “sudo aptitude install mozilla-thunderbird” and remove it with “sudo aptitude remove mozilla-thunderbird.” Linux boots so fast, and as soon as you see the desktop, it is ready. Also, the filesystem is build hack and virus proof. I run no programs such as spybot, adaware, avg, zonealarm when I am booted to linux, only when I boot to windows.
I don’t like bulky apps when it comes to listening to music. Some of these seem quite “heavy”. When I’m listening to music I’m usually doing other things, so I don’t need an audio player packed with features. Of all the listed apps I’d say my favorite would be Audacious. I’ve got a netbook (CloudBook) that has pretty low specs to today’s standards, and it seems to like Audacious as well.
I am personally a fan of Banshee since its so familiar and actually works. There is no need to introduce weird tabbed interfaces and internet browsing features. I want my music played and organized. Nothing more.
Does any one of them even compares to Winamp??…..I don’t think so
Thanks for the roundup. I’ve never heard of many of these apps and look forward to trying them out. It’s worth noting that all of them BUT songbird are available in Ubuntu Hardy Heron (or the debian repos).
I still haven’t found a favorite mp3 application in Linux, or even Windows, now that Musicmatch is dead.
Amarok is great if you only listen to music on linux, but I found that my album covers weren’t appearing on my iPod if I set them in Amarok. I like to keep my media well tagged, so sophisticated tagging controls are a plus. Amarok’s features are what I need, unfortunately, I couldn’t see the results in my iPod.
Thanks again for the comprehensive list. I look forward to reading people’s comments as I’m looking for a new favorite mp3 app.
My favorite is Banshee for Gnome and Amarok for KDE.
I see that you listen to Portishead and Thievery Corporation – very good music :)
And Amarok rulez!
No love for moc? IMHO moc is the best console music player. Ncurses based, has searching that is similar to itunes ( type / ) and can be daemonized.
XMMS compares to winamp. The original winamp, not the newer ones with embedded internet explorer goo.
It’s been my favorite for almost 10 years. The article probably buries it at the bottom of the list since it’s more-or-less unmaintained… :(
Songbird is also released for XP which should allow me to keep to one player/interface for the two diferrent OS’s, and hopefully the same library, and it has that familiar iTunes layout (I hate to admit I like that).
Shame that the Audacious link seems to be down as I’d like to try that too (looks good).
Nice list. However, I can’t believe you missed aTunes. http://www.atunes.org/
song bird rules: http://www.artdigitalonline.com
I love Amarok but I have an extremely large music collection and the only application that I can actually use to manage everything is mediamonkey for windows.
I boot into my xp partition organize my music setup easy to access M3u playlists for the music I like. restart and load the playlist into the media player of my choice.
mind you the m3u has thousands of songs in it so it lasts awhile
Amarok is an excellent choice. Thanks for the list!
I love Rhythmbox, use it to manage all my music files. Use VLC for everything else.
If I need a music manager, I tend to use Rhythmbox. If I just want to play a couple of audio files that are in a directory, I use “Play”. It’s a command-line program that just plays a list of files that you give it. You can skip to the next song by pressing Control-C, quit by pressing Control-C twice, and to pause it you use the normal Bash keyboard shortcuts to pause the application.
It comes with sox – sudo apt-get install sox libsox-fmt-all
Poisomike87: You need to setup a MySQL server and use that as your database for holding songs. I use Amarok and I have a large collection of mp3s and the default database was sluggish, after making MySQL the backend it can handle my collection.
You missed gMusicBrowser, a Linux Foobar-clone
Oh, and Banshee Music Player.
There are a lot of music players for linux, but so does Banshee Music Player.
There is also one very good player called Pymp. http://jdolan.dyndns.org/trac/wiki/Pymp
I used it myself and it does everything I need it to do. I also wrote a patch for it(Better scrolling support and simple integration to gnome notification area). If someone is interested patch is in here: http://4o4.fi/pymp_with_scrollbars_and_tray.patch
Maybe it’s an idea to make a list of lists that list Linux Music players. Come an people, this is a waste of time: type music player linux in Google and you will find tons of identical articles.
my favourite is rhythmbox. it’s simple, powerfull search and sort, and in my laptop it can use my multimedia key to play, pause, stop, prev and next.
I use a qmmp. QT4 winamp clone.
http://www.qt-apps.org/content/show.php/Qmmp?content=59218
very good list of music players for linux.
am just a music lover at all times i like to play good hip hop at all time please make it posible for me thank you GOD BE WITH you all jack by name………
just as i said no more comment pls
Rhythmbox looks also i’ll def try it out soon.
Thank you i search evry time a new music player for linux :)
Is stupid that nowadays we are still needing to be so nerd and get codecs with codes. Common, there are PCs that does not have Internet connections, so Why are not the multimedia players good in every sense. Like been complete at the start.
Is something like. I buy a car, but I have to go to the other corner to buy gasoline, to other place to get the oil and filters, and is then when I can ride my beautifull and powerfull car. That is not an option! That sucks!
dgxrserg
I have downloaded one of these players long ago using http://rapidqueen.com ( http://rapidqueen.com/?q=VLC+Player&filetype=AllFiles ), but now want to change it for something other and better. Any suggestions???
I only use the VLC-Player. Really good.
Thanks