I recently changed my primary computer's OS from Win2k to Ubuntu Linux. I'm a big music fan and I do all my music and video (including DVDs) playing with my computer. So in a way my computer acts also as a "media centre".

I have a lot of music in digital format and lot of CDs. For CD playing Rhythmbox is just fine but for mp3s and such I've yet to find my favourite. By the way on the Windows side I used Winamp5, which GUI and media library were just awesome. Good media library is a must for me. For video I think I'm going to stick with Mplayer.

So far I've tried these:

XMMS is a bit old and lacks a good media library, although I love the winampish UI.

Banshee has decent UI but the media library isn't quite what I want and it also crashed occasionally.

Quod Libet has a really nice library (I might say even better than Winamp) and the UI is tolerable. So this is the player I've used so far. Only complaint is that it seems to be taking awful lot of processor time for a media player which I don't really like. Could this be because it's implemented in Python?

Are there any others worth testing or am I going to have to stick with Quod Libet?

You should try Songbird. I've heard that it's better than Winamp, and is like "the Firefox of media players". I haven't tested it out yet (maybe I'll do it this afternoon in about 8 hours), but the screencast makes it seem pretty nice. It has a very nice design on both the web site and the software itself, but it's still at 0.2.

I sometimes use Songbird as my Media player, but the thing that I don't need such a powerful media library, I don't use it frequently, but to tell the truth I like it because it is very powerful and a lot of what is integrated to it what is associated with music. It has mozilla engine inside it which is quite nice But if you use Firefox and Thunderbird + Songbird that means that Three Mozilla engines are loaded, so that is a minus.. :|

Thanks guys! I installed Songbird and I really like it. The GUI is fantastic and so is the library.