There is an large amount of FREE audio player available for the Linux. In fact, Linux has all the tools needed to be a serious contender in music production without a user having to venture into the commercial software world.
I have compiled a list of 6 best audio player for linux OS. List follows: 1. Audacious Audacious is a semi-lightweight audio player with a WinAmp/XMMS-like skinnable GUI. It supports most popular audio formats including but not limited to: MP3, AAC, WMA v1-2, Monkey’s Audio, WavPack, various module formats, console/chip formats, CD Audio, FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. It has a compact, collapsible, movable playlist editor allowing you to view, sort, shuffle, load and save your music playlists. Content can be dragged directly onto the playlist, making it quick and easy to add media from different sources. The built-in equalizer is also collapsible and movable. Equalizer presets can be saved and loaded, and configured to load presets automatically depending on the file being played. Oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, and voiceprint visualizations are built in and can be customized. Audacious also supports external plugins, allowing endless possibilities for visualizations, new input and output capabilities, and audio effects and enhancements. 2. Amarok It’s an audio player for KDE offering a wealth of features, yet being intuitive to use. It has an attractive interface where music can be drag and dropped into the playlist. Amarok serves many functions rather than just playing music files. For example, Amarok can be used to organize a library of music into folders according to genre, artist, and album, can edit tags attached to most music formats, associate album art, attach lyrics, and automatically “score” music as it is played. Amarok does not support any media types directly, but instead uses a backend independent approach. There are plugins available for the iRiver media devices, Apple iPod, Creative Nomad and Zen. 3. Banshee It’s music management and playback software for GNOME. With Banshee you can easily import, manage, and play selections from your music collection. Banshee allows you to import CDs, sync your music collection to an mobile device, play music directly from an mobile player, create playlists with songs from your library, and create audio and MP3 CDs from subsets of your library. Banshee uses Gstreamer to play, encode, and decode Ogg Vorbis, MP3s, and other music formats, with only AAC files requiring the use of RealNetwork’s Helix media framework for decoding. 4. BMPx It’s the successor to the Beep Media Player. BMPx is a free software media player. It is a compact media player based on the GTK2 toolkit using custom widgets, with plugins basically source compatible with XMMS. BMPx features support for specifications like XDS DnD, XSPF and DBus. BMPx is highly interoperable and integrates well with other applications and a variety of desktop environments. While the original BMP was derived from XMMS, BMPx shares only a small amount of code with the original XMMS/BMP codebase, and was rewritten almost entirely from scratch. It uses GStreamer as its primary audio playback backend. 5. Exaile It’s a music player aiming to be similar to KDE’s Amarok, but for GTK+ and written in Python. It has many of the cool features from Amarok (and other media players) such as automatic fetching of album art, handling of large libraries, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm submission support, and optional iPod support via a plugin. Exaile uses the GStreamer multimedia playform for audio playback, as well as the Mutagen library for reading and writing track metadata. 6. JuK It’s a jukebox and music manager for the KDE desktop similar to jukebox software on other platforms such as iTunes or RealOne. Juk is unique in the way it lets you organize your files in multiple playlists in a simple and user friendly yet powerful way. JuK allows you to edit the “tags” of your audio files, and manage your collection and playlists. This package is part of KDE, as a component of the KDE multimedia module.
