Amarok !

This is a screenshot of Amarok, the best music player in my opinion. How can one see the player and not fall in love with it? I just loved it from the day I saw it. Its highly customizable, plays every format once the codecs are installed, and generally does all that can be expected from a top notch media player, and then some more.I quite like the Moodbar feature- it is the colourful bar that Amarok generates for each song that corresponds to the 'mood' of the song. You can see it at the bottom right corner in the screenshot.

Sadly, it is not available on Windows, though there is an official project to port it. Hope the binary for windows comes out soon. I have tried all kinds of softwares for windows, (Windows Media Player, Winamp, Quintessential Player, Mediamonkey, Itunes), but none of them really gives me the feel that I get from Amarok, if you know what I mean. Just for comparision's sake though, I felt Quintessential was one of the better music players.

Though Amarok was made to run on KDE, the high level of interoperability that GNOME and KDE have achieved means that Amarok runs quite well in GNOME environment too. You do have Exaile, a wannabe Amarok written for GNOME, but it just doesn't make the cut. There are others who feel that the simplicity of Exaile is better - but then that is the whole funda of GNOME - keep it simple. Which, by the way, somewhat constrasts that of KDE - to give as many customizations as possible.