The following is an incomplete list of Linux audio software.

Audio players

GStreamer-based

* Amarok is a free music player for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Multiple backends are supported (xine, helix and NMM). *

Banshee A banshee ( ; Modern Irish , from sga, ben síde , "woman of the fairy mound" or "fairy woman") is a female spirit in Irish folklore who heralds the death of a family member, usually by screaming, wailing, shrieking, or keening. Her name is ...

is a free audio player for Linux which uses the

GStreamer GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes the ...

multimedia platforms to play, encode, and decode Ogg

Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in con ...

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Orig ...

, and other formats. Banshee supports playing and importing audio CDs and playing and synchronizing music with iPods. Audioscrobbler API support. * Clementine is a

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

, open-source, Qt based audio player, written in C++. It can play Internet radio streams; managing some media devices, playlists; supports visualizations, Audioscrobbler API. It was made as a spin-off of Amarok 1.4 and is a rougher version of said program. *

Exaile Exaile is a cross-platform free and open-source audio player, tag editor and library organizer. It was originally conceived to be similar in style and functions to KDE's Amarok 1.4, but uses the GTK widget toolkit rather than Qt. It is wri ...

is a free software audio player for

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

operating systems that aims to be functionally similar to

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...

’s Amarok. Unlike Amarok, Exaile is a Python program and uses the

GTK GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and prop ...

toolkit. *

Guayadeque Music Player Guayadeque was a free and open-source audio player with database written in C++ using the wxWidgets toolkit. Guayadeque uses gstreamer. On September 29, 2023, it was announced on the Guayadeque forums that development had ceased.https://www.g ...

is a free and open-source audio player written in C++ using the

wxWidgets wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) is a widget toolkit and tools library for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for cross-platform applications. wxWidgets enables a program's GUI code to compile and run on several computer platforms with min ...

toolkit. * Muine is an audio player for the GNOME desktop environment. Muine is written in C# using Mono and Gtk#. The default backend is GStreamer framework but Muine can also use xine libraries. *

Quod Libet A quodlibet (; Latin for "whatever you wish" from '' quod'', "what" and '' libet'', "pleases") is a musical composition that combines several different melodies—usually popular tunes—in counterpoint, and often in a light-hearted, humorous ma ...

is a GTK based audio player, written in Python, using GStreamer or Xine as back ends. Its distinguishing features are a rigorous approach to tagging (making it especially popular with classical music fans) and a flexible approach to music library management. It supports

regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...

and

Boolean algebra In mathematics and mathematical logic, Boolean algebra is a branch of algebra. It differs from elementary algebra in two ways. First, the values of the variables are the truth values ''true'' and ''false'', usually denoted 1 and 0, whereas ...

-based searches, and is stated to perform efficiently with music libraries of tens of thousands of tracks. * Rhythmbox is an audio player inspired by Apple iTunes. *

Songbird A songbird is a bird belonging to the suborder Passeri of the perching birds ( Passeriformes). Another name that is sometimes seen as the scientific or vernacular name is Oscines, from Latin ''oscen'', "songbird". The Passeriformes contains 50 ...

is a cross-platform, open-source media player and web browser. It is built using code from the

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...

web browser. The

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows User (computing), users to Human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through graphical icon (comp ...

(GUI) is very similar to Apple iTunes, and it can sync with Apple iPods. Like Firefox, Songbird is extensible via downloadable add-ons. It's able to display lyrics retrieved from the net, and also the ones embedded through metadata (ID3v2 tag) after adding the LyricMaster plug-in. Linux official support for Songbird was discontinued in April, 2010. But in December, 2011 a group of programmers forked it openly as

Nightingale The common nightingale, rufous nightingale or simply nightingale (''Luscinia megarhynchos''), is a small passerine bird best known for its powerful and beautiful song. It was formerly classed as a member of the thrush family Turdidae, but is now ...

Music Player Daemon based

* Cantata is a Qt-based front-end for Music Player Daemon. * Ario is a light GTK2 client to MPD

Other

* aTunes is a free, cross-platform audio player for operating systems supporting the programming language

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

(Unix-like: Linux, BSD, Macintosh), and Windows. aTunes can also play Internet radio streams and automatically display associated artist information, song videos, and song lyrics. * Audacious is a free media player for Linux or Linux-based systems. It can be expanded via plug-ins, including support for all popular codecs. On most systems a useful set of plug-ins is installed by default, supporting MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files. Audacious' classic interface looks and feels very similar to Winamp. It is compatible with LADSPA plug-ins. * cmus is a small and fast text-mode music player for Linux and many other Unix-like operating systems. *

DeaDBeeF DeaDBeeF is an audio player software available for Linux, Android and other Unix-like operating systems. DeaDBeeF is free and open-source software, except on Android. History The player was first published in August 2009. Its author cited ...

(as in

0xDEADBEEF In computer programming, a magic number is any of the following: * A unique value with unexplained meaning or multiple occurrences which could (preferably) be replaced with a named constant * A constant numerical or text value used to identify a ...

) is a modular audio player for Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris, macOS, and other UNIX-like systems. * JuK is a free software audio player for KDE, the default player since KDE 3.2. JuK supports collections of MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC audio files. * mpg123 is a real time MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 audio player/decoder for layers 1, 2 and 3 (MPEG 1.0 layer 3 a.k.a. MP3 most commonly tested). Among others working with Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, SunOS4.1.3, Solaris 2.5, HPUX 9.x, SGI Irix and Cygwin or plain Windows. It is free software licensed under LGPL 2.1 * Music on Console (MOC) is an

ncurses ncurses (new curses) is a programming library providing an application programming interface (API) that allows the programmer to write text-based user interfaces (TUI) in a terminal-independent manner. It is a toolkit for developing " GUI-li ...

-based console audio player. It is designed to be powerful and easy to use, and its command structure and window layouts are similar to the Midnight Commander console file manager. It is very configurable, with

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) is a software framework and part of the Linux kernel that provides an application programming interface (API) for sound card device drivers. Some of the goals of the ALSA project at its inception were ...

(ALSA),

Open Sound System The Open Sound System (OSS) is an interface for making and capturing sound in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is based on standard Unix devices system calls (i.e. POSIX read, write, ioctl, etc.). The term also sometimes refers to ...

(OSS) or JACK Audio Connection Kit (JACK) outputs, customizable color schemes, interface layouts, key bindings, and tag parsing. * Sound eXchange ( SoX) is a cross-platform command-line audio editor. * X MultiMedia System (

XMMS X Multimedia System (XMMS) is an audio player for Unix-like systems released under a free software license. History XMMS was originally written as ''X11Amp'' by Peter and Mikael Alm in November 1997. The player was made to resemble Winamp, which ...

) is a GTK1-based multimedia player which works on many platforms, but has some features which only work under Linux. XMMS can play media files such as .ogg, MP3, MOD's, WAV and others with the use of input plug-ins. It is a free software audio player similar to Winamp that runs on many Unix-like operating systems. However, development of XMMS has been deprecated in favor of XMMS2, a new audio player built from scratch on the more modern GTK2 libraries. See also Audacious on this page as a successor to the historic XMMS. *

Tomahawk A tomahawk is a type of single-handed axe used by the many Indigenous peoples and nations of North America. It traditionally resembles a hatchet with a straight shaft. In pre-colonial times the head was made of stone, bone, or antler, and Eur ...

is a cross-platform music player built with social media and multi-source music streaming in mind. It features support for services like Spotify, Grooveshark, Dilandau, SoundCloud, 4shared, Jamendo, Last.fm, Ampache, Owncloud, Ex.fm and Subsonic.

Distributions and add-ons

* dyne:bolic * Musix GNU+Linux *

Planet CCRMA Planet CCRMA (pronounced ''karma'') is a collection of Red Hat packages ( RPMs ) to help set up and ''optimize'' a Red Hat-based workstation for audio work. Overview The entire environment, called Planet CCRMA, was developed and tested at ...

, an add-on for

Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004. Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. Red Hat published the first non-beta release ...

with many tools and system mods * puredyne (Ubuntu based) * Ubuntu Studio, an Ubuntu-based distribution geared toward multimedia * AVLinux (Debian-based)

Graphical programming

Pure Data Pure Data (Pd) is a visual programming language developed by Miller Puckette in the 1990s for creating interactive computer music and multimedia works. While Puckette is the main author of the program, Pd is an open-source software, open-source ...

(Pd), graphical programming language.

Audio programming languages (text-based)

ChucK Chuck is a masculine given name or a nickname for Charles or Charlie. It may refer to: People Arts and entertainment * Chuck Alaimo, American saxophonist, leader of the Chuck Alaimo Quartet * Chuck Barris (1929–2017), American TV producer * ...

, an audio programming language for realtime synthesis, composition, and performance. *

Csound Csound is a domain-specific computer programming language for audio programming. It is called Csound because it is written in C, as opposed to some of its predecessors. It is free software, available under the LGPL-2.1-or-later. Csound was ...

, composition, synthesis and processing. * Nyquist,

Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lispi ...

-based language for sound generation and analysis. Audacity supports plug-ins written in Nyquist. * SuperCollider, a language like

Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by ...

for real-time audio synthesis.

DJ tools

* Mixxx is a cross-platform and DJ package supporting a wide range of file formats, MIDI/HID controllers and timecode vinyl. *

xwax xwax is an open-source vinyl emulation software. It was initially developed in 2006 as proprietary software. In May 2007 xwax was licensed under the GPL-2.0-only, making it the first open source software of this kind. Unlike the software supp ...

Drum machines

Hydrogen Hydrogen is the chemical element with the symbol H and atomic number 1. Hydrogen is the lightest element. At standard conditions hydrogen is a gas of diatomic molecules having the formula . It is colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic ...

, drum machine and sequencer

Recording, editing and mastering

Digital audio workstations (DAWs)

* Ardour, a multi-track audio recorder. GPLv2+ * LMMS, music composer. GPL * Qtractor, a full featured multitrack

digital audio workstation A digital audio workstation (DAW) is an electronic device or application software used for recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software program on a laptop, to an integra ...

(DAW), with audio and MIDI sequencer. GPL *

REAPER A reaper is a farm implement or person that reaps (cuts and often also gathers) crops at harvest when they are ripe. Usually the crop involved is a cereal grass. The first documented reaping machines were Gallic reapers that were used in Rom ...

, a proprietary multitrack audio, MIDI recording and mastering software. *

Rosegarden Rosegarden is a free software digital audio workstation program developed for Linux with ALSA and Qt4. It acts as an audio and MIDI sequencer, scorewriter and musical composition and editing tool. It is intended to be a free alternative to ...

, MIDI sequencer. GPL * Tracktion, proprietary and commercial digital audio workstation. * Traverso DAW, a multi-track audio recorder. GPL * Harrison Mixbus and Mixbus32C, proprietary. * Bitwig Studio, proprietary and commercial digital audio workstation. *

Renoise Renoise is a digital audio workstation (DAW) based upon the heritage and development of tracker software. Its primary use is the composition of music using sound samples, soft synths, and effects plug-ins. It is also able to interface with MID ...

, a digital audio workstation (DAW) based upon the heritage and development of tracker software.

Audio editors and recorders

* Audacity, audio editor and recorder. * udio Recorder simple audio recorder, still offers events to trigger or stop recording * Ecasound, audio recorder. * Jokosher, audio editor. * Sound eXchange ( SoX). *

Sweep Sweep or swept may refer to: Cleaning * Sweep, the action of using a brush to clean * Chimney sweep, a worker who clears ash and soot from chimneys * Street sweeper, a person's occupation, or a machine that cleans streets * Swept quartz, a cleani ...

, audio editor. * WaveSurfer

Sequencers

* MilkyTracker, an old-school tracker. *

MusE In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the Muses ( grc, Μοῦσαι, Moûsai, el, Μούσες, Múses) are the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge embodied in the ...

, MIDI-audio sequencer. *

, commercial modern tracker-style sequencer. *

, a music composition and editing environment based on a MIDI sequencer. *

Seq24 Seq24 is a software MIDI music sequencer that runs under Linux and Microsoft Windows. Written in C++, it is designed to be simple to use and appropriate for live performance. Distributed under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later license, Seq24 is ...

, a loop based midi sequencer.

Other

* Baudline, signal analyzer. * Buzztrax, music composer. * Gnome Wave Cleaner, denoise, dehiss and amplify. * Impro-Visor, edit and playback jazz solos over chord changes and rhythm. * LinuxSampler, sampler. * Mp3gain, adjust MP3 playback volume without re-encoding.

Sound servers

aRts The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both ...

, the KDE 3 soundserver. *

Phonon In physics, a phonon is a collective excitation in a periodic, elastic arrangement of atoms or molecules in condensed matter, specifically in solids and some liquids. A type of quasiparticle, a phonon is an excited state in the quantum mechanical ...

, the multimedia framework provided by Qt 4 and used in KDE 4. * Enlightened Sound Daemon (EsounD, ESD). * JACK Audio Connection Kit (JACK),

real-time Real-time or real time describes various operations in computing or other processes that must guarantee response times within a specified time (deadline), usually a relatively short time. A real-time process is generally one that happens in defined ...

sound server. * Network Audio System (NAS). *

Network-Integrated Multimedia Middleware The Network-Integrated Multimedia Middleware (NMM) is a flow graph based multimedia framework. NMM allows creating Distributed computing, distributed multimedia applications: local and remote multimedia devices or software components can be controll ...

(NMM). *

PulseAudio PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD, macOS, as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris oper ...

, a sound server, drop-in replacement for EsounD. *

PipeWire PipeWire is a server for handling audio, video streams, and hardware on Linux. It was created by Wim Taymans at Red Hat. It handles multimedia routing and pipeline processing. History In 2015, Taymans started work on PipeWire. It was based ...

, a server for multimedia routing and pipeline processing.

Synthesizers

Amsynth amsynth is an open source realtime software synthesizer for Linux. Its operation is similar to analog Moog Minimoog The Minimoog is an analog synthesizer first manufactured by Moog Music between 1970 and 1981. Designed as a more affordable ...

* DIN Is Noise (

din DIN or Din or din may refer to: People and language * Din (name), people with the name * Dīn, an Arabic word with three general senses: judgment, custom, and religion from which the name originates * Dinka language (ISO 639 code: din), spoken by ...

), software synthesiser, musical instrument, uses computer mouse as bow. * FluidSynth, with the interface QSynth. *

Gnaural Gnaural is brainwave entrainment software for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later. Gnaural is free software for creating binaural beats intended to be used as personal brainwave synchronization software, for sc ...

, binaural beat and pink noise synthesizer. * LMMS, tracker, sequencer, synthesizer. * Pianoteq, digital physical modeling of pianos and related instruments. * PySynth, a simple software synthesizer in Python. * TiMidity, Play-convert MIDI files as-to PCM * WildMIDI, Some alternative to TiMidity * FluidSynth, a free open source software synthesizer which converts MIDI note data into an audio signal * Yoshimi, software synthesizer. * ZynAddSubFX, software synthesizer.

Effects processing

PulseEffects EasyEffects (formerly known as PulseEffects) is a free and open-source GTK application for Unix-like systems which provides a large array of audio effects and filters to apply to input and output audio streams. The application originally us ...

, effects processing for input and output audio streams with

. * FreqTweak, real-time audio processing with spectral displays. * Linux Audio Developers Simple Plug-in API (

LADSPA LADSPA is an acronym for Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API. It is an application programming interface (API) standard for handling audio filters and audio signal processing effects, licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later. It was originally d ...

). * Disposable Soft Synth Interface (DSSI), a virtual instrument (software synthesizer) plug-in architecture. * Sound eXchange ( SoX), the audio Swiss Army knife. * LV2, is the new audio Linux standard for plug-ins.

Format transcoding

* fre:ac * OggConvert * Sound eXchange ( SoX) * GNOME SoundConverter

Radio broadcasting

* Airtime, an automation system for radio stations. * Campcaster (discontinued), an automation system for radio stations. *

Icecast Icecast is a streaming media project released as free software maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. It also refers specifically to the server program which is part of the project. Icecast was created in December 1998/January 1999 by Jack M ...

, free server software for streaming multimedia. *

OpenBroadcaster OpenBroadcaster is a web-based, open-source system to run community radio and television broadcast transmitters with a simple web interface. History The initial concept was to develop a web based radio system to run emergency messages and p ...

, LPFM IPTV broadcast automation tools.

Radio listening

Streamtuner Streamtuner is a streaming media directory browser. Through the use of a C/Python plugin system, it offers a GTK+ 2.0 interface to Internet radio directories. Streamtuner does not actually play any files, it downloads a list of online radio s ...

, browse and listen to hundreds of streamed radio stations.

Score and tablature edition software

Frescobaldi The Frescobaldi are a prominent Florentine noble family that have been involved in the political, social, and economic history of Tuscany since the Middle Ages. Originating in the Val di Pesa in the Chianti, they appear holding important posts ...

, score writer * Denemo, score editor *

LilyPond LilyPond is a computer program and file format for music engraving. One of LilyPond's major goals is to produce scores that are engraved with traditional layout rules, reflecting the era when scores were engraved by hand. LilyPond is cross- ...

, score typesetter * NoteEdit, score writer * MuseScore, score writer * TuxGuitar, a tabulature editor, score writer and player oriented for guitarists.

References

{{Reflist Linux audio software