So. Banshee as a default media player for Karmic, replacing Rhythmbox. You’ve read the analysis on the Internest, you’ve read ill-informed tripe from pretend-journalists, and you’re running in fear of a switch to a “worse” player. Well, it’s time to lay down a little dose of reality for all you naysayers.

Amarok 2.1 Beta 1 is out in the wild! Featuring one of the longest ChangeLogs in Amarok history, this beta release showcases what is possible when building on the strong technical foundations that have been laid with Amarok 2.0. Nearly all parts of Amarok have received attention, and while not a final release, it is already very usable and quite stable.

Listen is a not so widely known audio player written in Python and using the GTK toolkit, with an interface similar to the one of Rhythmbox, and including features like a music library, podcasts support, lyrics fetching, Wikipedia integration, and Last.fm song submission.

The program MOC was reviewed in recent article called MOC — Console Audio Player for Linux. It was written by Roman Tworkowski. Even though we live in the times of cute graphical interfaces e.g. Compiz, KDE, etc. I consider the MOC player to be a better solution for some users (including myself) than the very popular applications Xmms or Amarok, and the other visually appealing players.