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 VLC Media Player
"Supports playback of most video files and DVD discs without the need to download external codec packs, including flv filescan. There are 5 different DVD region codes and VLC plays them all.
VLC also has the ability to take screenshots of your video, even while during DVD playback, a real attractive feature." (Review)
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SMPlayer
"Intends to be a complete front-end for MPlayer, from basic features like playing videos, DVDs, and VCDs to more advanced features like support for MPlayer filters, remember the settings of all files you play and more."
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Rhythmbox
"An easy-to-use music player and organizer that has a clean interface, and sports many features, such as album art display, online radio access, and CD burning. This software is powered by Gstreamer, and can therefore support all of its audio formats, such as WAV, AAC, MP3, OGG, FLAC and more." (Review)
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Banshee
Imports, organizes, plays, and shares music using a simple yet powerful interface. Other features include rip CDs, create playlists, burn audio and mp3 CDs, support for podcasting and music recommendations.
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Amarok
A powerful music player for multi platforms with an intuitive interface, supports for collection management, bookmarking, dynamic playlists, file tracking, integrated web services and more.
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 XBMC
"It is truly outstanding in this category and earns the Gizmo's Top Pick title rightfully in my eyes. It played all media files I fed it with and turned out to be the most reliable product for me.
XBMC offers convincing media library features and is highly configurable with custom skins and backdrops. You will find a vast amount of plugins, skins and other goodies for it as the community around XBMC is large." (Review)
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SoundConverter
Aims to be simple to use and fast for conversion from most audio files to wav, flac, mp3, aac and ogg files, supports for extraction of the audio from videos too. (Note: Install GStreamer MP3 Encoding to enable conversion to mp3.)
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Arista Transcoder
An easy-to-use converter to convert multimedia files from one format to another for playback on various devices. Supported output formats include m4v (Ipod), avi (Nokia, PDA or DVD player), mkv (computer) and mp4 (various Sony devices), depending on the device you choose.
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OggConvert
A small and easy-to-use utility to convert most audio and video files to the patent-free Ogg format, and support for encoding to the Matroska container format (mkv, mka), with adjustable settings on audio and video quality for conversion.
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 Kid3
"Edit all tags, generate tags from files or vice versa, import tags from databases, browse cover arts and lyrics from online resources, drag and drop cover art to a file, export tags, etc." Kid3 uses KDE libraries, while another package Kid3-qt is also available for installation without KDE dependencies." (Review)
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MusicBrainz Picard
"Identify track info by matching digital thumbprint with MusicBrainz database, show up existing tags with add and delete functions." (Review)
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K3b
A capable CD/DVD burner optimised for KDE, lets you easily burn data CDs/DVDs, create audio/video CDs and video DVDs, rip audio/video CDs and video DVDs along with other related tasks, good for experienced as well as beginner users.
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Brasero
Designed for ease of use to create a traditional audio CD, data CD/DVD, video DVD or a SVCD, burn an existing CD/DVD image to disc, copy a CD/DVD to a new disc or write to an image file in ISO and other formats.
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Furius ISO Mount
"Select or drag-and-drop an image file to mount, one-click unmount, supports for burning ISO and IMG files, generate MD5 and SHA1 checksums, saving history and retrieving previously unmounted images." (Review)
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AcetoneISO
A feature-rich application to emulate CD/DVD drives and manage CD/DVD images. You can use it to mount disk images including ISO, BIN, NRG, MDF and IMG formats, generate an ISO image from a folder or CD/DVD, backup an audio CD to a BIN image, burn CD/DVD, convert other images to ISO, extract image content to a folder, and more.
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 Asunder
A simple yet powerful audio CD ripper and encoder to save audio tracks from an audio CD as any of MP3, AAC, Ogg, WAV, FLAC, Wavpack, Musepack or Monkey's audio files.
Useful features include using CDDB to name and tag each track, encoding to multiple formats in one session, simultaneous ripping and encoding, tagging each track for a different artist and more.
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HandBrake
"Good quality in transcoded video, small file size, integrates the latest improvements to the H.264 encoding library with enhanced picture quality, speed optimizations and supports better control over multiple audio tracks." (Review)
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DeVeDe
An easy-to-use tool to create a video DVD, Video CD, Super Video CD and other disk images, with support for adding menus and subtitles, shifting audio and other video editing functions such as rotating, scaling, deinterlacing and more. You will need separate CD / DVD burning software to burn the disk images created by this tool for playback on your home players.
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ffDiaporama
A great tool to create a slideshow of your favorite photos with background colors and images, music and transition effects, clean user interface with drag-and-drop support for slides, and a preview of the slideshow from any point.
You can insert fixed or animated titles as well as movie clips into a slideshow, save your project for editing and export your result to mp4, mkv, mpg or avi formats. A wide range of video quality from QVGA (320x240) up to full HD (1920x1080) is supported.
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 Audacity
"It does all the recording and editing I need, and is much simpler and faster to use than a lot of paid products. The interface is easy to use, allowing you to select and apply a noise profile just as easily as removing it.
The program also can record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings, edit various sound files, cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together and change the speed or pitch of a recording." (Review)
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mp3splt-gtk
"Splits mp3 and ogg files without re-encoding, able to identify split points between tracks via online database services (CDDB or FreeDB)." (Review)
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 Avidemux
"It is designed for multi-purpose video editing and processing and is my personal favorite because of its simplicity yet wide range of tools.
The software supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. It lets you do just about everything under the sun, with well documented tutorials." (Review)
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OpenShot Video Editor
An open-source and non-linear video editor which is stable and friendly to use with support for many video, audio and image formats based on FFmpeg together with lots of other useful features.
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 ClipGrab
An efficient and free video downloader for YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, MyVideo, MySpass, Sevenload, Tudou, Clipfish and many other online video sites. You can enter keywords in the box to search videos on YouTube or paste the URL to a video, then select the format and quality of the video you need, click "Grab this clip!" and the app does the rest for you.
You can also configure how the app behaves when a downloadable video is discovered in your clipboard, and whether you want to keep metadata (ID3 tags) when you download and convert videos to mp3 files.
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 LMMS (Linux Multimedia Studio)
"As a stand alone application, one would be hard pressed to find a more comprehensively full featured and versatile free music creator than this, with so many instruments and effects to choose from.
The onboard Beat/Bassline editor removes the need for a separate drum sequencer and is a very nice touch: LMMS really is a one stop shop" (Review).
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 MuseScore
"The best free music notation software with fast and easy note entry in WYSIWYG mode. It's integrated with a sequencer and FluidSynth software synthesizer and allows for an unlimited number of staves; up to four voices per staff; 128 instrument sounds for playback plus eight drum and percussion sets.
Other features include import and export of MusicXML and standard MIDI files; output as PDF or PNG documents and basic ensemble scoring." (Review).
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4. Best Free Multimedia for Linux
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Comments
Multifunctional program
ubuntu tweak
Cleaning, simple adding ppa sources for various programs, configuring gnome for ubuntu
ubuntu-tweak.com
use vlc player
it has got the option "open directory" under file menu
Hi jojoyee.
My top pick on B/F Music Creation (LMMS) is an excellent Linux/cross platform app that could go on your list:)
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-music-software.htm
Thanks for the heads up. LMMS is on the list now :)
Vuze is not a good bittorrent client. It eats up a lot of ram, is bloated with unecessary features, and is now blocked on many private trackers such as what.cd and waffles.fm. Transmission and rtorrent are better clients for linux. Plus vuze has annoying ads.
I recently investigated all the free Linux HTML editors. I ended up with Quanta Plus. It's outstanding, with PHP support and a preview function.
Not to be confused with its ancestor, Quanta Gold, which is cross-platform but obsolete and commercial.
:)
Firestarter is no longer maintained or recommended by those in the know.
Use either ufw, or if you need a GUI, GUFW.
Well, those in the know, know, that all of these are just front ends to the low level IPTABLES. So, if makes no difference what you use.
Rik, Category Editor Best Free Windows 7 / Vista 64 bit Software and Site Technical Support (that means CentOS, etc)
Nice article, CD/DVD burning tool, you mentioned imgburn (windows based)and brasero. do you know there is a tool called K3B performs even better than Nero, By the way thanks for the useful info to new comers to Linux.
Thanks for your kind comments. K3b is a good application and will be included in the next update soon.
if possible can you suggest me a mobile tracking application for linux ..it's the 4th time i lost my cell phone and unable to trece...... i m presently in india......if possible help me .......
I tried ClamTK and it's full of bugs. I'm using Avast Free for Linux. Just follow these instructions http://www.liberiangeek.net/2010/07/antivirus-software-ubuntu-10-04-lucid-lynx/ to get around a bug in the updates.
Chandler... ????
You're recommending software that can't even be installed on the last two full digit versions of Ubuntu. How exactly is it we're supposed to take your suggestions seriously?
Then don't!!
If there is a mistake, point it out, or you have got suggestions, give them. But do so in the right way. The way you are doing this, is not correct. Next time, such comments will be deleted.
Oh what a joy it must be to be "smart". The local Linux club here has a lot of folks still with 8.04 who have no intentions of changing. Guess they'll be happy at least.
It's a pity that the Debian package at the developer's site has not been updated to keep up with the latest version of Ubuntu. That said, some at Ubuntu Forums have reported to get it to work on Ubuntu 10.04. See http://ohioloco.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9509051
Which parts of this page have just been updated?
That's a good question Syntax_error. Links to the recently udpated items are now provided at the top of the Category Index table.
An excellent list, there were even some applications I did not know of. A few additions:
Ex Falso:
Easily rename/move your mp3's based on the tags. I usually first change the tags with picard, and then place them in my music directory, on /artist/year_album/track-tracname. It's an incredibly flexible program which can even omit tags in the name if they're missing, suppose the year of the album is missing, you could just tell it to use only the album title.
Transmission:
A small, yet fully featured torrent client. Small system load and it can do anything you'd want: add more trackers, limit upload/download speed (on demand and scheduled), select the files you want to download, change priority of individual files/folders, block specific IP addresses (by using a remotely maintained block list), use encrypted transfers, etc.
Geekbox also might be worth a try:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/geexbox-lightweight-media-system
It's supposed to be a very light weighted multimedia system, not as fully featured as XBMC, but it can be easily used from a live usb stick.
Good stuff. Is there a generic scanner driver for ubuntu/linux Os? I have flat bed scanner but unable to connect because there is no valid driver support.
Thanks for your good suggestion Martin. Transmission is now included in the list.
Ex Falso has not been added in the list as Kid3 seems to be much better in terms of tags support including lyrics and album art as well as other editing features.
Sorry I'm replying to your post later than expected as I've just got a chance to take a look at GeeXboX, which is not an application but an OS that can boot as a LiveCD. I'll need to check out more on this software.
If you've not got a solution, please check if this guide is helpful to you.
When using ImgBurn with Ubuntu I can create the ISO but I'm unable to access my cd/dvd drive. Anyone have this problem?
*Update* Turns out the problem was my CD drive itself. Replaced my CD/DVD drive and ImageBurn works flawlessly. ImageBurn is also my favorite burner when using Windows.
For those who preferred Amarok 1.4 over the new amarok 2.0..a lookalike named "Clementine" has been created. It should really get a mention.
Most of the newer distro's are switching from Openoffice to Libreoffice. A quick google will give specifics as to why. Libreoffice is a fork of the original openoffice project.
Thanks Famewolf for mentioning Clementine. It's now in the list.
As for LibreOffice, it's discussed in our forum thread here. This product will be added in the list once the developer has released a final version. Currently is an rc and not yet "production-ready".
[Update: The final version of LibreOffice has been released and available for download at the developer's site. This new office suite is now included in the list. Give it a try.]
Look what cm0nster said about Clementine:
My first experience with Clementine was not a pleasant one ...
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/best-free-music-players-and-organizers.htm
You're spot on Panzer. Taking its place now is Rhythmbox to reflect the recent update in the review of the software category.
I've gone back to school this semester and find I will need to install Linux on a spare machine so I can do homework at home. I'm taking a compiler class so I just need Linux, a C compiler, lex and yac. What would you suggest?
I haven't touched Linux in about 15 years and I haven't taken classes in over 10 years so can you suggest a good C tutorial to bring me up to speed? (I never was strong in C anyway.)
Thanks.
Did anyone actually try the clementine player under LINUX which is what this thread is supposed to be about? The review pointed to was from someone trying the windows version. Plenty of apps have issues when being ported from one os to another.