Miro previously called Democracy player is a cross platform internet television application developed by Participatory Culture Foundation. The latest release is Miro 2.5.3 and it comes packed with a lot of goodies. It's alternatives include Boxee and also XBMC which do really perform as good as Miro. You can install Miro directly from synaptic, but you won't get the latest version. Here is what you need to do.
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Mirage is a Banshee plugin which can automatically add acoustically similar songs to the ones you have already added. This is a very useful plugin if you are an avid banshee user. All you need to do is, add the kind of song you want to play into the special playlist and this playlist will automagically generate similar sounding songs. Let's give it a ride. Before that, may be you want to install the latest banshee release in your Ubuntu  as well.
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Amarok 2.2 codenamed "sunjammer" is released. This all new release comes with  a lot of improvements and bug fixes. Amarok 2.2, like they have quoted on their blog , is the next step towards the ultimate music player! Let's hope that they will stick on to their promises.
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After some 6 months of hard work by Banshee developers, Banshee 1.5 has been released. But it is not yet available in the official Ubuntu repo. Here is how you could upgrade your existing Banshee 1.4 to all new Banshee 1.5 in Ubuntu.

Update: Banshee 1.5.1 is released.
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XBMC is an award winning free and open source software for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and XBox. Not so familiar with this popular application, here is a quick preview on what all XBMC Media Center can do for you. You may also want to check out the feature additions into XBMC 9.04 Babylon which was released during May 2009.
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Earcandy is a PulseAudio volume manager, which for me is probably the first thing that i ever liked about pulse audio. This volume manager could mute music in your amarok or rhythombox or literally any music player when you play some video in youtube(i am not lying) or VLC or other video players. Mute is not the right word, but instead the music slowly fades away, and the sound from video player fades in. Sounds promising eh? But it is much better than you think.
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Amarok has been my preferred music player since i started using Ubuntu some 3 years ago. It was nimble and so easy to configure and use. And then came Amarok 2.0. Though i wholeheartedly admire the effort made by those behind  this all new Amarok 2, i still have a lot of  issues with Amarok 2.x series.
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Smplayer is basically a front end of mplayer, which is arguably the best video player in linux. Though i would prefer VLC 1.0 over smplayer. But its all depended on your choice. And choice is what linux is all about. Smplayer constitutes all the basic features like playing videos, mp3's, DVD's, CD's etc, but also include advanced applications like support for mplayer filters and more.
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Boxee is a cross-platform freeware media center software with promising new social networking features. Boxee is based on XBMC media center, an award winning open source project. Since i had  already tested the latest XBMC 9.04, i was not expecting anything dramatic from an alpha release of Boxee. I was way wrong.
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Much awaited VLC 1.0, codenamed Goldeneye, is finally released. VLC is arguably the best open source multimedia player you could get. VLC supports almost all kind of media content out there and the sheer size of feature list will blow you away. You may want to check this out.
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