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Where can you find the coolest music players? The hottest jukebox programs? On a Mac? A Windows PC? Marcel, our Linux guy, says no. It's on Linux.

When talking about cool music applications, Linux isn't usually the first thing on people's mind. In the world of the Ipod, it's tough to think there could be other great music applications, but there are. Sitting at my computer, I enjoy being able to play a little music. How I do that depends on what I need, or want. The most basic application is the CD player (quick demo).

For MP3s, I'm looking for a little bit more than that and this brings us to two very popular players, both of which have been around for some time. You'll find one pre-installed on just about every Linux distribution. That's XMMS (demo that one and show off the skinning feature). Point out that you can download additional skins from the XMMS website (and there are tons). Whether the second application is there depends somewhat on whether you are running KDE (although you don't need to — KDE apps work fine even if you are running GNOME). That second player is NoAtun (demo with KJoful skins).

To really get fancy, particularly if you have lots of music on your computer (mine isn't particularly song heavy, but I've got a couple of hundred songs ripped to my hard disk), you need a jukebox program (think ITunes). The KDE environment comes with one by default and it's called JuK (demo JuK, show playlists, etc — show inline editing of tags).

My very favourite jukebox program is something called amaroK and it seriously rocks! This is a beautiful program that lets you dynamically create playlists, auto-scan your disk for new media, track your favourite songs by the number of times you've played them entirely, and so on. There's also a great feature that lets you download covers from Amazon.com so that they are displayed while the music is playing. There's also an automatic lyrics lookup in case you want to know the words or sing along. amaroK also

All of these have some kind of visualization plugins so you can enjoy a little light show while you listen. Last but not least (because there's more!), amaroK lets you listen to Internet radio broadcasts (show playlist if there is time). You can visit Marcel's website at www.marcelgagne.com

ABOUT THE GUEST
Marcel Gagné is probably best known as the award-winning author of the Linux Journal ‘Cooking with Linux Series', for which he received the Readers' Choice award for favorite column four years in a row. His latest book, ‘Moving to the Linux Business Desktop” follows his immensely successful “Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!'. One of the best known voices of the Linux world, he has written numerous articles on Linux and open source projects for various publications including Linux Journal, InformIT, Unix Review, SysAdmin magazine, and others. He also appears regularly as the Linux guy on G4's “Call for Help”. A long-time systems and network administrator, Marcel is a published science fiction author and editor, a pilot, an avid science and astronomy buff, and a former top 40 disc jockey. He also folds a mean Origami T-Rex.”