Audacious Media Player
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article does not cite any references or sources. (May 2008) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
| Audacious | |
|---|---|
 |
|
 Audacious Media Player with default skin |
|
| Developed by | Audacious Team |
| Initial release | October 24, 2005 |
| Latest release | 1.5.1 / May 23, 2008 |
| Written in | C, C++ |
| OS | POSIX-compatible |
| Available in | Multiple languages |
| Development status | Active |
| Genre | Media player |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | http://audacious-media-player.org/ |
Audacious is a GUI-based free software media player for POSIX systems, such as Linux.
Contents |
[edit] History
It is a fork of Beep Media Player 0.9.7.1, which 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, BMPx.
The reasons for the fork were purely technical. There were some quirks in Beep Media Player that had annoyed users, such as the ID3v2 tag handling, which had been reported as buggy by some users. The developers also had their own ideas about how a player should be designed, which they wanted to try in a production environment. Besides, Beep Media Player allegedly lacked functionalities that were considered useful for people who did streaming, such as support for an XMMS-like "songchange plugin".
[edit] XMMS "successor" controversy
 |
This article or section needs to be updated. Please update the article to reflect recent events / newly available information, and remove this template when finished. |
Many distributions have replaced XMMS with Audacious. This has resulted in many people claiming that Audacious is the successor to XMMS, and that its feature set should be similar. Many developers involved in the project have found the demands from this particular segment of the user community to be ridiculous, and have commented on the fact that Audacious was never meant to be a successor to XMMS.
The reason why many distributions have replaced XMMS with Audacious is because of the similar UI design. This has led to the decision to drop Winamp2 skin support in the 2.x branch of Audacious (but there's a plugin planned to enable use of the skins if wanted). A simpler player based on Audacious and GStreamer is intended to satisfy the demand created for another XMMS-like player.
[edit] Features
[edit] Plugins
Audacious owes a large portion of its features to plugins, including all codecs. On most systems, a useful set of plugins is installed by default. This includes, for instance, the ability to play MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files.
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.
[edit] Skins
Audacious had full support for Winamp 2 skins, and as of version 1.2, some free-form skinning is possible.
Audacious 2.x will have a non-skinned UI which will better emphasize on many of the player's features which are poorly exposed in the UI.
[edit] Clients
Audacious is intended to be a media player and not a client (XMMS2), though it supports the concept of other clients connecting to it, such as Conky.
Connection to audacious for remote control can be done over plain DBus, by using MPRIS, or using the official audtool utility created just for this purpose.
