In the last twelve months, we have made more than 4000 commits, closed over 4000 bugs, released 6 new versions of Amarok, written a Quick Start Guide to Amarok, attended over 10 conferences and had a big developer sprint in Switzerland. All of this, thanks to your donations!

Songbird has left the Linux flock and gone on to perceived greener open source pastures. But what are the Linux faithful to use to replace this one time music player gem that was heralded as the alternative to iTunes?

It may have a name like an exotic fruit but Guayadeque music player is a surprisingly powerful new addition to the Linux music player scene. Light on resources and heavy on features.

Music Applet is a small, simple GNOME panel applet that lets you control a variety of different music players from the panel. Music Applet provides easy access to information about the current song and the most important playback controls.

Those of you who have been following my Linux Critic blog know that I’ve been on an app-hunt to replace some of the applications to which I’ve grown used to in KDE, mostly so that I can break my ties with that desktop and move forward completely without it.

For a time, GNU/Linux music library tools seemed to be, well, non-existent. Sure, XMMS was an awesome media player. But if you wanted to catalog your music, you were out of luck. Apple users had iTunes and were always rubbing it into the free software world's face. Even Microsoft, the sleeping Redmond giant, had upgraded Windows Media Player to include a library feature.

Gimmix is a graphical music player daemon (MPD) client written in C using GTK+2. It's very simple and easy to use, yet offers many features to make your audio experience a pleasant one.

As long as we have music, there will always be many players to support it. Linux is no exception, and today we’re going to look at some of the top contenders for both GNOME and KDE. Some music players may be grouped together due to their similarities.