XBMC Media Center 13.0 "Gotham" Beta 1 has been released, bringing improvements across all platforms, such as hardware decoding on Android, proper PulseAudio support for Linux, improved settings, support for some 3D movie formats and more.

Audience is a minimalistic, Gstreamer-based media player written in Vala. The second Audience release is getting close and its developers have invited users to help test it. There aren't any major new features since the previous release, but a large amount of bugs have been fixed recently. So if you can help test it or just want to give it a try, read on.

The latest Parole 0.4.0 features CD and DVD playlist support, DVD navigation support, custom subtitle management and other new features along with some important bug fixes for fullscreen controls, screensaver inhibition and others.

Xnoise 0.2.13 has been released today, introducing a new Album Art view, similar to the one available in Banshee or in Rhythmbox through the CoverArt Browser plugin, along with a new application icon created by Reda Lazri.

The new Album Art view can be accessed from the toolbar/menu or by using the CTRL + B keyboard shortcut. There's an integrated search too, which supports searching for artist, album or track name so you don't have to exit the Album Art view to find out on which album you can find a certain track:

Rhythmbox 2.97 has been released a couple of days ago, bringing a new, more compact header layout which includes album art by default, along with a new podcast subscription interface and other minor new features and bug fixes.

The Ubuntu Sound Menu can get very crowded because many applications are automatically added the first time you run them. Here's a quick way to remove / blacklist applications from the Ubuntu Sound Menu (for Ubuntu 12.04 only).

Audience, a Gstreamer-based media player for Linux written in Vala is getting closer to its first public release. But firstly, it needs testing so if you want to help, install Audience and submit any bugs you find @ Launchpad (before you do, try the videos in Totem to make sure the bugs are Audience-specific).