Best Free Audio Editing / Splitter for Linux

Audacity 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)

Ocenaudio , a fast, easy-to-use and powerful audio editor provides users with an intuitive audio editing and analysis tool without complications. It supports multiple file formats, with real-time waveform and spectrogram views, multiple selections, one-click effects and handling large files with an advanced memory management system.

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)

Best Free Audio / Video Format Conversion for Linux

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.)

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.

WinFF converts many supported media files from one format to another and serves as a frontend of FFmpeg. It comes with preset conversion settings and options for common formats and devices. For example, to convert an mp4 to an mp3, select Convert to “Audio”, preset “MP3”, then save the result in an output folder.

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.

Best Free CD / DVD Burning Software for Linux

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.

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.

Best Free CD / DVD Emulation Software for Linux

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)

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.

Best Free CD Ripper for Linux

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.

Best Free DVD Authoring Software for Linux

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.

Best Free DVD Ripper for Linux

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)

Best Free Media Center for Linux

Kodi (formally known as XBMC) 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.

Kodi 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 Kodi is large. (Review)

Best Free Media Player for Linux

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)

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.

Best Free MP3 Tag Editor for Linux

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)

MusicBrainz Picard , identify track info by matching digital thumbprint with MusicBrainz database, show up existing tags with add and delete functions. (Review)

Best Free Music Creator for Linux

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).

Best Free Music Notation Software for Linux

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).

Best Free Music Player and Organizer for Linux

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.

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.

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)

Best Free Photo Slideshow Software for Linux

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.

Best Free Radio Broadcasting for Linux

Great Little Radio Player , a simplistic radio station streamer allows you to listen to a collection of 400 radio stations worldwide on the Internet, sort stations by country or genre and set your favorite stations as well. Other features include add stations, import and export stations, skin changes and localization settings.

Best Free Screen Session Recorder for Linux

SimpleScreenRecorder , an easy-to-use screen session recorder to record the entire screen, a fixed rectangle or a window on your screen, with various input options including frame rate, scale video, record cursor and audio. Output files can be saved in a container format using audio and video codecs of your choice provided they are installed and supported in your system.

Best Free Video Downloader for Linux

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.

4K Video Downloader , copy a video link from your browser and paste it in this app to download videos, playlists, channels and subtitles from YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and other supported video sites in high quality.

Best Free Video Editor for Linux

Avidemux 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)

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.