Linux Media Players

What Do You Mean?

Ubuntu has a huge variety of music players aside from the bundled Rhythmbox. Some other popular ones are Banshee, Clementine, Exaile, Nuvola, and VLC. All of these music players are feature filled and fast, leaving nothing to desire. To me, the choice really comes down to which interface you like although some have features that set them apart from the rest.

Rhythmbox

This is the media player that is bundled with Ubuntu, it has a huge number of features and extensions and an easy to use interface. For someone coming to Linux, this is very similar to iTunes and Windows Media Player, with a few slight interface differences and a bunch of extra features. I was a long time user of this Media Player before I found Banshee and wouldn't hesitate to use it again.

Rhythmbox is installed with Ubuntu, to find it simply click the Ubuntu icon in the top left corner and type Rhythmbox. Click the icon and it will pull right up.

Banshee

Banshee is my favorite offline media player, although I also use Nuvola for my cloud music. I prefer this simplistic, speedy interface to any of the other options, but that doesn't mean you will. Banshee also has a vast array of plugins to enhance your experience, and unlike Rhythmbox can play video. I used this program to manage my 15,000 song music library and have never had a problem. You'll see why I also use Nuvola further down in the post.

To install Banshee open Terminal and type,

sudo apt-get install banshee

Clementine

Clementine is a fast, simple media player. Its layout is clean and easy to navigate. Clementine supports cloud music from many services as well as offline music. You can have a playlist containing music from multiple cloud providers and offline files all in one, which I find really cool. This would be my one and only Media Player if it supported Google Play Music cloud streaming.

To install Clementine open Terminal and type,

sudo apt-get install clementine

Exaile

Exaile is very similar to Clementine, but missing cloud integration. None the less it is a great application with a simple interface. For those that want their music library with no nonsense this is the application to get.

To install Exaile open Terminal and type,

sudo apt-get install exaile

Nuvola

Nuvola is my internet media player of choice. It can use a variety of internet services and basically makes music websites look and act like an offline application. This is very useful to me as I use Pandora and Google Play Music quite often. I could not recommend this application enough to any user that uses online music services.

Installing Nuvola is a bit more complicated then the rest, but nothing that is too hard as long as you follow directions. To install Nuvola open Terminal and type,

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nuvola-player-builders/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nuvolaplayer

VLC

Last but not least is VLC, the king of music players. It will open almost any music or video format you throw at it. I use VLC for all my videos and movies for that reason. You can also use it as a viable tool to manage your music library. This is the end all be all of players, if your current player doesn't support your media, you can bet VLC will.

To install VLC open Terminal and type,

sudo apt-get install vlc