Audacious (software)

Audacious

Audacious 3.2-devel in Fedora 16
Initial release October 24, 2005 (2005-10-24)
Stable release 3.7.1 (December 28, 2015 (2015-12-28)[1]) [±]
Preview release 3.4 (June 28, 2013 (2013-06-28)) [±]
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

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):

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

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Audacious (software).

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

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Sunday, May 31, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.