Audacious (software)

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."

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, while version 3.0 has full support for GTK+ 3.x and uses it by default. 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.

Features

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.

Output 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 a host of colorized skins without editing them manually.

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.