Audacious Media Player

Infobox Software
name = Audacious



caption = Audacious Media Player with default skin
developer = Audacious Team
released = October 24, 2005
latest_release_version = 1.5.1
latest_release_date = May 23, 2008
programming language = C, C++
operating system = POSIX-compatible
language = [http://audacious-media-player.org/index.php?title=Translations Multiple languages]
genre = Media player
license = GNU General Public License
status = Active
website = http://audacious-media-player.org/

Audacious is a GUI-based free software media player for POSIX systems, such as Linux.

History

Audacious 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".

Features

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, FLAC and Monkey's Audio 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.

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.

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.

See also

*Free audio software
*Linux audio software

External links

* [http://audacious-media-player.org Audacious home page]