Ubuntu OS provides several applications for you to freely enjoy your media. Since Ubuntu does not allow DRM(Digital Rights Management) you can pretty much listen to or watch anything you like without big brother watching over your shoulders. Ubuntu unlike other OS have freely available media applications from music, video players to software for image, sound and video editing. With Ubuntu there is no limit to how much you can unleash your creativity, this very site is proof of what these freely available applications can do.

Ubuntu by default comes with Rhythmbox Music Player. Most music players in Ubuntu can be download it from the software repositories using the Synaptic Package Manager(Applications-> System-> Synaptic Package Manager).

Amarok is a music player for Ubuntu with an intuitive interface. Amarok makes playing the music you love easier than ever before – and looks good doing it. Visit the website http://amarok.kde.org

Import, organize, play, and share your music using Banshee’s simple, powerful interface. Rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs. Most portable music devices are supported. Visit the website http://banshee-project.org/Main_Page

Exaile is a music player aiming to be similar to KDE’s Amarok, but for GTK+ and written in Python. It incorporates many of the cool things from Amarok (and other media players) like automatic fetching of album art, handling of large libraries, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm submission support, and optional iPod support via a plugin. Visit the website http://exaile.org/

Rhythmbox is an integrated music management application, originally inspired by Apple’s iTunes. It is free software, designed to work well under the GNOME Desktop, and based on the powerful GStreamer media framework. Visit the website http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/

Rhythmbox has a number of features, including:

• Easy to use music browser
• Searching and sorting
• Minor improvements have been made to gradient rendering performance.
• Comprehensive audio format support through GStreamer
• Internet Radio support including last.fm streams
• Playlists
• Display audio visualizations
• Transfer music to and from iPod, MTP, and USB Mass Storage music players
• Display album art and song lyrics downloaded from the internet
• Play, rip, and burn audio CDs
• Automatically download audio podcasts
• Browse, preview, and download albums from Magnatune and Jamendo

Ubuntu does not provide any default media centers, however there are some applications which can be downloaded and installed.

Elisa is an open source cross-platform media center solution designed to be simple for people not particularly familiar with computers.

With Elisa you can enjoy:

• Watch your pictures with previews and nicely animated slideshows.
• Watch your movies and video clips as well as online ones.
• Manage your music collection by artists or albums covers.
• Elisa automatically finds media on your network, from network drives, ITunes, Windows Mediaplayer, Rhythmbox, etc.
• Automatically detects IPods, cameras, USB hard drives, etc.

Visit the Elisa website http://elisa.fluendo.com/

Ubuntu also provides several applications for managing you photographs but again Ubuntu has a default photo management application called F-Spot.

F-Spot simplifies digital photography by providing intuitive tools to help you share, touch-up, find and organize your images. Visit the website http://f-spot.org/Main_Page

• Simple user interface
• Make simple modifications your photos
• Create image CDs
• Export and share your photos to the web (flickr & Picasa)

Although Ubuntu does not shine in this area in particular it does have some great applications for everyday home/personal and to some extend for professional use.