Audacious 2.1 Review - Powerful Audio Replacement for XMMS

Audacious is a powerful audio player for Linux which resembles the older XMMS, only using GTK2 toolkit for its interface. It supports XMMS and implicitly Winamp 2.x skins, coming with support for various audio formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or WMA (Windows Media Audio).


Audacious was forked from Beep Media Player, which was also based on XMMS but development was discontinued in 2006. Audacious is currently maintained and the latest version was released in July this year. For a tutorial on installing the latest release in Ubuntu 9.04, check out this tutorial I've put up a while ago.

The version I used for this review is 2.1 as it comes included currently in the Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic repositories. Audacious comes with the typical, simple interface some of you are used from XMMS. It includes a main window with regular play/pause/stop and volume buttons, a 10-band equalizer and the playlist itself.

The playlist can be arranged easily to display various fields, like only the artist, album, song title and duration, but it can also be sorted by title, album, artist, filename, path, date, track number or (the default) playlist entry. Adding a large collection of music to the playlist can take a very long time, but once they're loaded, Audacious will prove very fast.

Aside from skins and equalizer, this player really comes bundled with a lot of features: visualizations, simple tag editor, a playlist manager, but the true power of Audacious is support for plugins. It comes with a huge number of plugins, which include Last.fm song submission, alarm, GNOME shortcuts, global shortcuts, status icon for Pidgin, and not only those. Plugins really turn it into a more useful, powerful experience. Local cover art fetching should not be forgotten either.


Regarding configurability, Audacious is very rich. It allows you to select which output plugin it will use, configure the replay gain, customise its appearance by installing new skins, configure playback, also offering a rich variety of options for the playlist.


Audacious is a wonderful player, and it will fit those who like XMMS or users who switched from Windows and are used to Winamp. Also, it takes a different approach than players who share a common interface like Rhythmbox, Banshee or Exaile.
Source URL: http://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/audacious
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How-To: Compile and Install Audacious 2.1 in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

Audacious is a GTK music player similar with the older XMMS (X Multimedia System) player. Ubuntu 9.04 ships with Audacious 1.5.1, which is a little old. However, you can easily install and set up the latest Audacious (currently 2.1) following the steps below:


Audacious 2.1 running in Ubuntu 9.04


1. Install the development libraries
Open GNOME-Terminal or Konsole and type:

sudo apt-get build-dep audacious

This command will fetch and install all the development libraries needed by Audacious, including the build-essential meta package which depends on compilation tools.

You will also need to install the libxml++1.0-dev package:

sudo apt-get install libxml++1.0-dev

2. Download the source tarball
Get the source tarball from the Audacious official website (direct link here), save it for example in your home directory and then uncompress it:

tar -xzf audacious-2.1.tgz

3. Compile and install Audacious
First, you can uninstall the current Audacious from repositories (if you have it installed):

sudo apt-get remove audacious
sudo apt-get autoremove

Then, issue the usual commands in the audacious-2.1 directory:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Alternately, you can specify another prefix for the installation, and install Audacious as normal user somewhere inside your home directory. For example:

./configure --prefix=/home/USER/usr
make
make install

Replace USER with your username and make sure the path /home/USER/usr is included in your $PATH environment variable.

At this point, if you run Audacious (using audacious2), the following error may appear: audacious2: unable to launch selected interface skinned

So proceed to the next step and install the plugins.

4. Installing the Audacious plugins
This should be the same as the first part of the tutorial. First, get the development libraries:

sudo apt-get build-dep audacious-plugins

Next, download the source tarball called audacious-plugins-2.1.tgz from the same location (direct link here), uncompress it with tar -xzf audacious-plugins-2.1.tgz, change the current working directory to audacious-plugins-2.1 and issue the usual:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Run audacious as audacious2 (or type Alt+F2 and enter audacious2 in the run box).
Source URL: http://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/audacious
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