Audacious 3.2-devel (in Fedora 16) |
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| Developer(s) | Audacious Team |
| Initial release | October 24, 2005 |
| Stable release |
3.1.1 (December 5, 2011) [±] |
| Preview release | 3.2-alpha1 (December 19, 2011) |
| Development status | Current |
| Written in | C, C++ |
| Operating system | POSIX-compatible |
| Available in | Multiple languages |
| Type | Media player |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | audacious-media-player.org |
Audacious is a free software audio player with a focus on low resource usage, high audio quality, and support for a wide range of audio formats.[1] It is designed primarily for use on POSIX-compatible systems such as Linux, with limited support for Microsoft Windows.[2] Audacious is the default audio player in Lubuntu and in Ubuntu Studio.[3][4]
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Audacious began as a fork of Beep Media Player, which was 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."[5]
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.
Prior to version 3.0, Audacious used the GTK+ 2.x toolkit by default. Partial support for GTK+ 3.x was added in version 2.5,[6] while version 3.0 has full support for GTK+ 3.x and uses it by default.[7]
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):
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.
Audacious is intended to be a media player and not a client (unlike 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 an MPRIS-compatible client, or using the official Audtool utility created just for this purpose.