CMus (also called C* Music Player) is a ncurses-based audio player which can be run in a shell, with no need for an X server. CMus is very powerful and highly configurable, and it features Vi-like commands and keyboard shortcuts which can be bound to other keys if needed. It supports various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3 (with libmad), WAV, AAC or WMA.

CMus (C* Music Player) is an ncurses-based audio player which can be run in a shell, with no need for an X server which is very configurable with Vi-like commands, multiple views and keyboard shortcuts. It supports various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, WAV, AAC or WMA.

Audacious is a powerful audio player for Linux which resembles the older XMMS, only using GTK2 toolkit for its interface. It supports XMMS and implicitly Winamp 2.x skins, coming with support for various audio formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or WMA (Windows Media Audio).

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.

Next is an overview of the best audio players available in Linux. I will only review the GUI players, leaving tools like mp3blaster, mpg123 or ogg123 for some other time. To begin with...

I always try to keep audio and video player separate from each other. Most people don't care until their system gets jammed about memory stuff.

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.

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.

Decibel Audio Player is a GTK+ open-source (GPL) audio player for GNU/Linux. It is very straightforward to use thanks to a clean and user-friendly interface. It is especially targeted at Gnome  and follows the Gnome HIG.