The closest thing I ever found to a perfect unified music player application was Amarok 1.4. It let me:

• stream and/or download podcasts,
• transfer between my iRiver (when it still worked) and my no-name portable ogg player,
• manage my collection of ripped and downloaded music,
• stream Internet radio stations,
• listen to Magnatune tracks,
• create playlists that didn't restrict items from being played once only per list, and
• minimize to the tray instead of a miniwindow.

Sadly, most of that is gone now with the Amarok 2.x branch, which is all that Ubuntu 9.04 has in its repositories. Much to the agony of many, I might add. Amarok is no longer the close-to-perfect application I wrote about two years ago; it's now simply a me-too imitation of underpowered Gnome-default music applications.

And I'd rather not have to use more than one application just to listen to stuff, although I know I can.

• I've tried Rhythmbox. It falls flat on podcasting.
• I've tried Exaile. It falls flat on podcasting and playlist support, though I do like its alarm-clock feature.
  • I now have two CDs I ripped that wake me up every weekday morning, which run in Exaile.
• I'd go back to Amarok 1.4 if it weren't such a resource hog and a pain to restore.
• I've tried XMMS. It's the one I started with when I migrated to Linux.
  • Although it has all the features that WinAmp 2.x had on the Windows side, it has the same limitations as well.

Edit: I forgot to note in the original revision...

I tried making a custom playlist in Exaile, and the order i wanted involved repeating a few songs from my collection. However, Exaile won't let any song appear more than once per playlist. That is, frankly, a stupid limitation to have in something as customized as a playlist.

What's a good all-in-one music application for Linux?

Edit: