Voting mpd, again... Used to love Amarok but it dropped features I liked (which aren't, necessarily, in mpd) and I moved to a lighter desktop as my hardware aged.
I bet VLV wins though.

It's still what I'd use this year... and has been updated on git last month...

I actually tried both versions yesterday - the old version did not compile because gcc version mismatch, the git version crashed my machine (hard reboot required).

Works for me. Maybe try a prebuilt package for your distribution. All the ones I know of work fine.

Surprised to see people use a video player for audio.. Actually, I've used both Amarok and Clementine the last year with little satisfaction. I still remember the days of MusicMatch Jukebox and it's complex framework for managing and playing audio files.

The new players seems to mimic the primitive and minimalistic (and useless) way of doing things that itunes introduced. A very poor player with a minimum of useful features. Most don't even have an equalizer.

I wish there was something better, so I did not really vote on this one, but I tend to use Amarok or Clementine if I have to. At least Amarok is not so damn unstable as it was in the past. I also miss when XMMS just worked and was simple (almost like a Winamp clone). Sometimes something simple can be nice.

Now I feel like I'm stuck with no good options, and I have to settle for things.

If anyone is reading this and want to make a Musicmatch like "do it all" music playing tool for GNU/Linux, hot dang, that would be awesome. You are awesome!

I have been also, over the many years that VLC has been in this vote.
I came to the conclusion that people using Linux who listen to music are either using their computer as a CD player replacement or don't really listen to music through their computer at all.

As an aside, I loved AmaroK in the (I think) KDE 4.2 days when it had a truly controllable playlist with the ability to manipulate a pseudo-random playlist on the fly.

I never really liked Amarok. Aside from it not being nowhere as complex as MusicMatch Jukebox (for windows), it was terribly unstable and many times barely usable for me. It crashed and crashed. The player and interface itself is ok, but it leaves much to be desired.

Just some core features of MusicMatch for comparison:
- Graphical library representation <-- core part of interface
- ID3 tag editing
- Direct filename editing (in library)
- Multiple ways to render and show the library (standard was ex folder-files or artist-song)
- Playlist management <-- core part of interface
- Playlist display <-- core part of interface
- CD ripping tool
- CD ripping name ID3 tag tool (including batch)
- Batch library renaming tool
- CD burning tool (??) <-- not 100% sure
- Equalizer with presets and custom presets

And lots of other things. The program basically had anything related to audio, music and libary management in the same place. So, unlike most other programs you would not play music from a list of files, you would use your library to manage playlists, and then you would load those playlists to be played. But you could ALSO play from the libary, individual songs.

I can see something like this happening in GNU/Linux actually. It doesn't take too much, most tools are already available, they just need to be combined correctly in a good GUI. It was just a fantastic music program that makes the stuff of today look like a joke.

Regarding VLC, I do keep trying other ones, but VLC has a lot of features that people don't seem to know about. I recently tried about 5 or 6 different audio applications and each one spent ages importing something from my 12TB NAS, which was getting tedious. Amarok was by far the quickest at this. But what about VLC? Well, all I had to do was add the music location on my NAS to the VLC library and I could just browse directly and you can add to the playlist. Or you can just play the files directly if you want to preview before adding to a playlist.

I am not decided on it yet, but ironically, while I decide what to use, VLC does the job well without being intrusive or annoying!

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Okay, which troll voted for mpg123 when mpg321 was right there under it?

I wonder if Cantata will be on next year.