Audacious
Version: 4.0 Web:http://audaciousmedia-player.org
We haven’t reviewed a music player for Linux for a while now, mainly because there are so many available. However, we have strong feelings for Xmms-inspired players, which is a good-enough reason to give the new Audacious 4.0 release a whirl.
We started by building the software from source (no packages were available at time of writing) and discovered that while Audacious is quick and easy to build, it requires the audacious-plugins package to run. The latter has much more build dependencies, of which some are optional, but they give a good impression of the program’s huge range of features. It’s impossible to list everything here, but the player covers most known audio formats, supports JACK output, LADSPA effects, gapless playback, tag editing and more.
Audacious continues to be simple to use and free from clunky components such as a music library, builtin database and other complexities. As in the good old Winamp/xmms days, you’re supposed to drag some files over the Audacious window, sort them and enjoy the music. Playlists and an equaliser are also on hand.
Interestingly, the Audacious interface supports two modes: one is ‘modern’ (looks like a simplified itunes), and another is ‘classic’ (for those Winamp/xmms lovers). The two modes look drastically different, but it’s just skin-deep: the right-click menu provides the same set of extra options regardless of how you want Audacious to look.
The player’s design is modular and we recommend discovering the Audacious extra modules and plug-ins that may not be enabled by default. For instance, the Bauer stereophonic-to-binaural DSP module improves the headphones experience, and there are dozens of other effects, from wide-range compressor and vocals remover, to background noise and hiss filter. With more features like album art, lyrics, Shoutcast and Icecast radios, Audacious is a treat for FOSS music lovers!