Audacious (software)

Audacious

Audacious 3.2-devel in Fedora 16
Initial release	October 24, 2005
Stable release	3.7.1 (December 28, 2015[1]) [±]
Preview release	3.4 (June 28, 2013) [±]
Development status	Active
Written in	C++[2]
Operating system	Linux, Windows
Type	Audio player
License	GNU General Public License
Website	audacious-media-player.org

Audacious is a free and open source audio player with a focus on low resource use, high audio quality, and support for a wide range of audio formats.^[3] It is designed primarily for use on POSIX-compatible systems such as Linux, with limited support for Microsoft Windows.^[4] Audacious is the default audio player in Lubuntu and in Ubuntu Studio.^[5][6]

History

Audacious began as a fork of Beep Media Player, which itself is a fork of XMMS. William "nenolod" Pitcock decided to fork Beep Media Player after the original development team announced that they were stopping development in order to create a next-generation version called BMPx. According to the Audacious home page, Pitcock and others "had [their] own ideas about how a player should be designed, which [they] wanted to try in a production environment."^[7]

Since version 2.1, Audacious includes both the Winamp-like interface known from previous versions and a new, GTK+-based interface known as GTKUI, which resembles foobar2000 to some extent. GTKUI became the default interface in Audacious 2.4.

Before version 3.0, Audacious used the GTK+ 2.x toolkit by default. Partial support for GTK+ 3.x was added in version 2.5,^[8] while version 3.0 has full support for GTK+ 3.x and uses it by default.^[9] However, dissatisfied with the evolution of GTK+ 3.x, the Audacious team chose to revert to GTK+ 2 starting with the 3.6 release, with long term plans of porting to Qt.^[10]

Features

Audacious with GTK+-based interface running on Windows 7.

Audacious with Winamp-like interface running on Ubuntu 8.04.

Audacious with external .wsz Skin running on Ubuntu 11.10.

Audacious contains built-in gapless playback.

Default codec support

• MP3 using libmpg123
• Advanced Audio Coding (AAC and AAC+)
• Vorbis
• FLAC
• Wavpack
• Shorten (SHN)
• Musepack
• TTA (codec)
• Windows Media Audio (WMA)
• Apple Lossless (ALAC)
• 150 different module formats
• Several chiptune formats: AY, GBS, GYM, HES, KSS, NSF, NSFE, SAP, SPC, VGM, VGZ, VTX
• PlayStation Audio: PSF1 and PSF2
• Nintendo DS Sound Format: 2SF
• Ad-lib chiptunes via AdPlug library
• WAV formats provided by libsndfile plugin.
• MIDI via native OS synthesizer control or TiMidity.
• CD Audio

Plugins

Audacious owes a large portion of its functionality to plugins, including all codecs. More features are available via third-party plugins.

Current versions of the Audacious core classify plugins as follows (some are low level and not user-visible at this time):

• Decoder plugins, which contain the actual codecs used for decoding content.
• Transport plugins, which are lowlevel and implemented by the VFS layer.
• General plugins, which provide user-added services to the player (such as sending tracks with AudioScrobbler)
• Output plugins, which provide the audio system backend of the player.
• Visualization plugins, which provide visualizations based on fast Fourier transforms of the wave data.
• Effect plugins, which provide various sound processing on the decoded audio stream
• Container plugins, which provide support for playlists and other similar structures.
• Lowlevel plugins, which provide miscellaneous services to the player core and are not categorized into any of the other plugins.

• Ouput plugins:
  • PulseAudio output
  • OSS4 output
  • ALSA output
  • Sndio output
  • SDL output
  • FileWriter plugin – no sound is played, the output is instead redirected into a new file: this plugin supports the output file formats: WAV, mp3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, it can be used to transcode a file and also to rip a CD
  • JACK output

Skins

Audacious has full support for Winamp 2 skins, and as of version 1.2, some free-form skinning is possible. Winamp .wsz skin files, a type of Zip archive, can be used directly, or can be unarchived to individual directories. The program can use Windows Bitmap (.bmp) graphics from the Winamp archive, although native skins for Linux are usually rendered in Portable Network Graphics (.png) format. Audacious 1.x allows the user to adjust the RGB color balance of any skin, effectively making a basic white skin equivalent to millions of skins of different hues.

Clients

Audacious is intended to be a standalone media player and not a server (unlike XMMS2), though it accepts connections from client software, such as Conky.

Connection to Audacious for remote control can be done over plain DBus, by using an MPRIS-compatible client, or using the official Audtool utility created just for this purpose.

See also

• Software audio players (free and open-source)

References

1. "Audacious Website".
2. "Search results – Github".
3. "Linux manual page for Audacious".
4. "Audacious 2.5-alpha1 release announcement".
5. "lubuntu 11.04 released".
6. "UbuntuStudio/PackageList – Ubuntu Wiki".
7. "Audacious – Frequently Asked Questions".
8. "Audacious 2.5 release announcement".
9. "Audacious 3.0-alpha1 release announcement".
10. "GTK2 port".

Further reading

• McFarland, Patrick (5 December 2006). "From XMMS to Audacious: The history of a Winamp clone". Free Software Magazine. Retrieved 20 May 2013.

External links

• Official website
• Code repository
• Code repository for plugins
• Bug tracker