MP3 Audio Players in Linux

There are no shortage of audio players in Linux. It has everything from command line mp3 players(mpg123) to RAM eating GUI players(like Amarok). With easily available codecs, linux supports almost all available formats.

I am going to do a series on the diffrent audio players available for Linux. This will focus on dedicated audio players – not video players that can handle audio as well(like mplayer).

The most popular audio players for linux are…

XMMS
A Winamp clone. Simple and user friendly, it is very popular on linux.
XMMS
Amarok
Amarok is the most feature rich player on Linux right now. It is a KDE app.
Amarok
Audacious
Another Winamp clone – this is actually a fork of beep-media-player.
Audacious
Banshee
Music management and playback for Gnome
Banshee
Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is an integrated music management application, originally inspired by Apple’s iTunes.
JuK
An audio jukebox that supports collections of MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files. It is a part of the kdemultimedia package.
Juk
SongBird
Songbird is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up.
SongBird
Exaile
Exaile is a music player aiming to be similar to KDE’s Amarok, but for GTK+ and written in Python.
Exaile
mpg123
A fast, free console based MP3 audio player for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Hpux and near all other UNIX systems.

I will explore XMMS in more detail in the next post.

9 comments

  1. Congratulations and goodluck for the new blog! I love linux.. so keep writing great stuff while I get hooked into your blog 🙂

    Cheers!!

  2. I think in Linux now-a-days its the case of “Too Many Crooks Spoil the Broth”, I think the idea should be to try to follow the rule of “one-application-one-program”. A new user would be overwhelmed with the number of options available and end up not using any

  3. @cafm
    I would say this is true for Linux distributions – but I will not say that for audio players. Windows has a lot of MP3 players – more that Linux anyway. But in windows there is a clear winner in the lot – WinAmp. There is no such winner in Linux(maybe amaroK).

  4. hello .
    i am new here and also linux .
    i am facing a lot problem to use linux.
    first of all i need help how i can install a software in linux and i want to instal a software for mp3 songs in linux
    any one can help ne how i do this

    Regrads
    Naveed Ahmad
    university of Engineering and Technology Taxila
    Pakistan

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