In the past I reviewed Minirok, which is a minimalist music player for KDE with a simple interface. Well, Decibel surely is its counterpart in GNOME. The version I'm going to talk about is 1.00 running in Ubuntu 9.04 with GNOME 2.26.

Decibel is a music player built in GTK which takes a different approach when it comes to the way features are implemented, and that is, Decibel uses only plug-ins which can be enabled or disabled on demand. This makes it either a pretty featured player, or a very simple and basic one, depending on which plug-ins you need enabled.

"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.

Exaile is a powerful and complete audio player for the GNOME desktop environment, which can easily compete with more popular players like Banshee or Rhythmbox.

Scanning a music collection of about 700 Ogg Vorbis files took around 3 minutes and a half, while adding all those tracks to the playlist took about 3 minutes too on my Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz and 1 GB DDRAM2.

There is a huge number of audio players for GNOME which thrive to offer as many features as possible, with Banshee, Exaile or Rhythmbox currently being the most popular for this matter. Since features like easy access to lyrics, Wikipedia information or collection management are a must-have for a complex audio player, it looks like Listen makes no exception regarding those either.

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.

Rhythmbox is the default audio player coming with the GNOME desktop environment, featuring a clean, typical interface which is so common for GTK audio players. I could say that Rhythmbox has little missing features and it is rather complete.

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.