When I first tried Linux around 1995, it was nearly as user-unfriendly as Windows ME. The fonts were ugly, connecting to the Internet -- at a blazing 56k, no less -- was one success easier than unassisted brain surgery, and getting printers and other peripherals to run was about as easy as getting Corey Feldman away from a flock of paparazzi.

I was intrigued by, and believed in the Free (as in beer and speech) software philosophy, though, so every few months I'd dig out whatever distribution was currently advertised as the most user friendly (Red Hat, then Mandrake, then back to Red Hat) for the good old college try.

I finally settled on a very simple and painless Mandrake installation, which I wrote about on my blog in an entry called "Penguin Time," which has the glorious distinction of being the first piece of writing I was ever paid for -- Clamor Magazine bought it from me to run in a special Linux issue. (No, I haven't cashed the check; it's framed and in my office, thank you very much.)

Eventually, I hosed the installation with careless use of conflicting software installs and other silly uses of sudo that shouldn't have been available to a noob like myself, and I found myself using a HD install of Knoppix, which lead to a pure Debian install (from the tiny network install CD, which is really cool) before landing in my current distribution of choice, Ubuntu (which is an ancient African word that means "can't install Debian.")

While Linux is still not entirely ready for people like my parents, it's really matured over the years, and in many cases it "just works" (unless you get reckless with sudo, like I did yesterday) without a lot of hassles and tweaking of configuration files and compiling from source (not that there's anything wrong with that.)

In fact, Linux has grown up so much and so well, today I can devote an entire column to some of the cooler media players available to Linux users, rather than the once-obligatory HOW TO on getting your printer to work, or mounting and unmounting a CD-ROM device with just five lines of script.

Note that these are audio-only players, so awesome tools like VLC, Xine, and Kaffeine are beyond the scope this column.


XMMS
XMMS gets a place on my list of cool media players because it's the first one I ever used, and it's still reliable ten years later. It's lightweight, looks and feels similar to WinAmp, and runs in any desktop environment without any complicated configurations or annoyingly complex dependencies. If you're looking for a very simple player, and if you really miss the glory days of listening to Art Bell talk about Y2K in WinAmp, XMMS is the player for you. There are a few forks, including Audacious and XMMS2.


Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox was one of the first (possibly the first, a statement that I can't confirm but will certainly start a holy war somewhere) music players for Linux that attempted to bring iTunes' functionality to a *nix system. It will organize your music collection in all the ways iTunes does including ratings, artist, genre, etc. It will download, update, and play podcasts, as well as stream Internet radio stations. You can share your library across a network (I've tested this with iTunes on my iMac, my Powerbook, and also in Linux on an old Dell lappy) and it can mount shared DAAP libraries (like iTunes, if Apple hadn't done something to iTunes 7 that apparently busted the standard) and portable MP3 players. There are plugins that will display album artwork, update your Last.fm account (and play Last.fm streams) display song lyrics, and burn CDs from playlists. As I said, it pretty much does everything that iTunes does, and integrates just as seamlessly into Gnome as iTunes integrates into OS X.


Banshee
Banshee, like Rhythmbox, is built on top of a multimedia library called Gstreamer, which lets developers build cool multimedia projects like, well, Rhythmbox and Banshee. It has many of the same functions as Rhythmbox, with a similar interface. It will burn CDs from a playlist selection, build smart playlists from tags, sync your iPod, and handle podcasts and Internet radio streams.

There are some very cool plugins that can do all kinds of neat stuff, from recommending music and artists to you (using Last.fm), to updating your metadata (tags, covers, etc.) using MuzicBrainz, to displaying 3D covers of your albums just like Coverflow.


Amarok
Amarok's motto is "Rediscover your music," and after you've spent ten minutes with it, you'll understand why.

Amarok is much more than just another music player or iTunes clone; in fact, it blows iTunes away. It is Kryptonite to iTunes Superman. It's the Death Star to iTunes' Alderaan. It's --- well, I guess I should tell you why it's so great, huh?

If you're a music lover, and you're old enough to remember albums ( they're like CDs but bigger and easier to scratch, kids) and you were one of those people who read all the liner notes, tried to track down lyrics before lyric archives existed online, and devoured musical biographies like A Saucerful of Secrets, Catch a Fire, or Learning to Die, Amarok will give you a pants party. In addition to organizing your library in all the usual ways, it has bunch of integrated ways to, as they say, "rediscover your music" with tools that can transform any album from a passive listening experience to a freakin' A&E in-depth special on the band. You can search for song lyrics, link to artist's pages on Wikipedia, download and display album artwork, and get a list of similar artists for whatever you're currently listening to (I didn't know that Spoon is like Wilco, and according to Amarok, I'll probably like Spoon because I like both Wilco and the Flaming Lips, for example.) If you're listening to a stream (it integrates the last.fm player, so you can scrobble your library or tune into any last.fm station, as well as the usual sources of Internet radio streams) and you want to learn more about the playing artist, Amarok will give you links to Wikipedia, similar artists, and show you if there's anything in your library that matches the current track, and how good the match is. This is such a cool way to learn more about music and discover new music, it's like having Uncle Joe Benson and Rodney Bingenheimer sitting in your living room with you.

Like Rythmbox and Banshee, it also integrates a simple but powerful CD burning interface, linked by default to k3b; just highlight a list of songs, choose "create CD," and watch it go to town. Amarok can also mount and handle a wide variety of media devices, including iPods and all the other standard MP3 players, as well as your iTunes shares (sort of. Amarok has the same problem with iTunes 7 that the other players have. Thanks, Apple.)

If all of these features aren't enough for you, you're in luck. Amarok has a ridiculously large collection of user-submitted scripts that do everything from making .sig files from your current tracks, to controlling your player via a bluetooth remote, to auto searching and downloading .torrents of a song, artist, or album that's currently playing (don't steal music kids. Stealing is bad, mmmkay?)

Great. Which one should I use?

All of these players will handle most formats, like Ogg, MP3, WAV, and WMA. If memory and screen real estate is an issue, something lightweight like XMMS is perfect. If you just want to hear the music and don't care about organizing the library or tracking down lyrics or other information about the track that's playing, it's going to get the job done for you quite nicely.

But if you're looking for a more full-featured experience, and you have the cycles to spare, Amarok wins by eleventy billion thousand million miles. I have never loved a music player as much as I love Amarok, and I've never had as much fun flipping through my library and learning more about my favorite artists. Next in line is Rhythmbox, which does most of the things Amarok does but with simpler graphics and fewer plugins. However, the trade off is fair: Rhythmbox is lighter and less resource-intensive than Amarok (on my machine, anyway.) Banshee is okay, but it falls into a gap between Amarok's feature set, and Rhythmbox's smaller footprint. I'm interested to see what further Banshee development brings, but I took it off my machine as soon as I was done trying it out.

These players are all very easy to get and install, especially for users of any Debian-like system; just apt-get whatever package you're interested in, and get ready to rock.

This experience was enlightening for me. There are a lot of different projects in the FOSS world, and many of them, like these, overlap. This is great for user options and choice, but I wonder how much it's holding back development of really killer apps. It also illustrates the need for a broad adoption of open standards that all developers can consistently work on. As a Mac and Linux user, I was really annoyed that I couldn't get iTunes 7 or my Mac-formatted ipods to work well with any of these players. I'm really tired of software and hardware developers limiting what I can do with the stuff I buy.

Did I miss a media player that you love? Did I forget to mention a feature from one of these players that makes it rock even harder, like inward singing? Let me know in comments.

For those about to rock, Wil Wheaton salutes you.