I’m a big fan of the old ‘WinAmp’ styled audio players. But sure if you have a huge audio collection, a music library function with the ability to search and quickly find tracks is a useful feature. For my needs though, an audio player with a simple playlist is more than enough. And also, audio managers like Rhythmbox that are included in many GNU/Linux distributions are not exactly appealing in my eyes either.
That said, there aren’t a lot of up-to-date audio managers for GNU/Linux that follow the UI style of the old WinAmp, but if you know where to look, you can always find one 🙂 . In that sense, maybe Sayonara might satisfy your needs.
Sayonara comes with a lots of features such as a music library (with fast searching), equalizer, a spectrum display, fancy audio level display, mp3 converter, Lastfm integration, podcast support & streaming, and a couple of other features. It’s not just an old WinAmp looking player, it’s actually rather a features rich one.
But all those features aside, I just like to use it with the simple looking playlist, without the music library and other fancy features. That said, there are a couple of issues with Sayonara that can be a bit frustrating.
For instance, when you disable its default skin and set it to use the native theme of your desktop, it doesn’t ‘inherit’ it well, at least on Gnome 3.16.2 on Fedora 22 (on top of the volume-bar & the progress-bar, it displays additional bars that don’t perform any functions, for instance).
However, if you’re using it on Gnome3’s dark theme, with Sayonara set to its dark variant (default), then it’ll look very native.
The music library also has a small issue too. That is, when you select a file, it doesn’t highlight it. Sure you can still select tracks & make changes, but they just don’t get highlighted in a different color, which it can be confusing.

Luckily, it doesn’t happen in the playlist window, though.
Other than that, so far, it has worked well under Fedora 22. They’ve also released a new version a couple of days ago (maybe those issues are fixed in it), but the update isn’t still available for the Fedora 22 users.
So anyway, if you’re interested, you can install it out on Fedora 22 by simply issuing the below command:
sudo dnf install sayonara
If you use Ubuntu, then you can install it (on 15.04, 14.10, 14.04…) using the below three commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lucioc/sayonara
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sayonara
That should do it. Enjoy!.
Awesome player……i always use winamp in windows. Sir,do u know any video player for playing latest hevc mkv files for ubuntu.I used vlc,totem and smplayer.I want something like windows kmplayer or potplayer.
Hi Ankit,
I pretty much use the same multimedia players that you use as well… (oh and you don’t have to call me ‘sir’ 🙂 ).
Thanks for replying bro……I discovered 2 more good video player.
1)kodi
2)Mpv (it can be used with smplayer shell and has no audio sync problem like default sm player.)
Excellent 🙂 .
Gayan, that is just great. Thanks man! Hey, you are the best 🙂
You’re welcome Alan! 🙂 .
All these years using Linux I’ve stuck with VLC because, as you say yourself, Rhythmbox is so ugly. This not only looks good but works great. I’m using it right now to listen to the radio.
Excellent! 😀 .