I've been running pure Linux on my home PC for about four months now and I'm finally getting to the point where I'm feeling comfortable with this thing. I've found some pretty good applications that put my XP install to shame.

Today I want to write about music players on LInux. My primary player is Amarok. It's a great program because of it's neat features. My favorite is that it builds dynamic playlists from you music collection by using data from on the MusicBrainz website to find songs that are similar to the one currently playing. Also, the program has good controls and nice desktop integration including Notification Area Controls and On Screen Display. It also has a built-in audioscrobbler plugin, which I really dig because it's been a pain to install the plugins for some of the other players.

Besides, Amarok, I've also been using Muine, a really fast and easy music player. I use it when I want to play an individual song or individual album and I don't want to wait for Amarok to load. A neat feature of Muine is that it automatically downloads album covers from Amazon. One potentially negative aspect of using Muine is that it is a Mono application and you have to install the Mono stack in order to get the program to work.

Other audio players include XMMS and BMP. Both are WinAMP clones. BMP is a more modern version of XMMS. Finally, there is Rythmbox, the default music player that comes with Fedora. Its simple fast and it works.