About a month ago I've installed Linux on a friend of mine's computer. He's a musician, so music is probably the biggest part of his life. So the most frequent question was not "Which kernel?", but "What player?". He's running KDE, but Noatun and Kaboodle made him sick. I understand, 'cause these are IMHO the worst players I've ever seen.

So we've stopped on three programs. Two of them are very famous and the third one is pretty new, but most featureful and very teethy ;)

As I promised, they are divided into three sections. It doesn't mean, that you can't use console progams in KDE, or QT-built programs in Gnome.

1. Console - mpg123 - http://www.mpg123.de/
Probably the oldest console mp3-player. Supports mp3. Plays it good ;) Nothing more to say, except that it's console-based and has minimal level of interaction. It's good, 'cause mpg123 can be used in various shell scripts and crontabs. E.g. on my machine it's used be an alarm. Metallica at 6 a.m. is a good thing to wake a block of flats, not even a room ;)

2. GNOME/GTK - XMMS(X MultiMedia System) - http://www.xmms.org/
XMMS is a unix-clone of a famous WinAMP. It was previously known as X11Amp. Well, it's a Winamp it self. Skins, plugins, visualisation - nothing special. Supports many sound outputs - driver itself(OSS and ALSA), esound, arts, raw disk output, and, of course, /dev/null. Nobody knows, why is necessary, but almost every *nix-program makes use of this famous device. I've used it for many years, until I've found our third -

3. KDE/QT - AmaroK - http://amarok.kde.org
First impression - It's GREAT! This player is more ergonomic than iTunes. It has more features than Winamp. It's pretty young (comparing with others), but I think will gain it's popularity very fast. First, it supports two behavours. It can act like Winamp (many windows) or like iTunes or Foobar2000 (one window). Playlists, media library, visualisation and so on and so forth. It also implements some of iTunes features (intellectual playlists, preferred songs and many more). But for me the main feature is that amarok is ONLINE player. Of course, you can use it on a standalone machine, but if you are connected to the Internet...
Other players implement CDDB information, AmaroK does. But not only that. It's integrated with last.fm, Wikipedia and lyrics finder. You can read the lyrics of the playing song (and if it is not found, you'll get a choice of similar e.g. same song by another singer), or read about the singer/group in Wikipedia.
Another good thing is AmaroK's OSD(On-Screen-Display). It shows song, started to be played, playlist changes etc. In concatination with hotkeys (KDE-globals or local) it becomes a powerful controlling tool.
Supported engines are xine, aRts, Gstreamer and of course /dev/null (remember kids?).

Well, now AmaroK is my desktop player. Wish you th same.