Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, Audacious is an open-source music player, having the features of a modern music player, including support for audio effects, equalizer, lyrics and plugins, visualization, support for Winamp skins and support for playlists organized in tabs.
Starting with Audacious 3.6, the software adopted GTK2 by default, while at Qt5 version is also available via the settings menu.
The latest version available is Audacious 3.6, which has been recently released, bringing a lot of changes.
Major changes added:
- A completely new Qt-based user interface, which can be installed alongside the existing GTK+ and Winamp Classic interfaces. The new interface is usable today but not yet as feature-rich as the existing interfaces. In future, it will be the basis of a Mac OS X port of Audacious—stay tuned.
- We have switched back to using GTK+ version 2.x by default. It has now been over three years since the release of GTK+ 3.0, and yet the “legacy” version of the toolkit provides more features relevant to Audacious, better cross-platform support, a more stable API, and lower memory usage. Audacious can still be built with GTK3 if desired, but we recommend the GTK2 variant for any desktop environment other than GNOME 3.
- The source code has been converted from C99 to C++11. In addition to making the Qt port easier, the use of C++11 is already allowing more rapid development by letting the compiler work out many details that previously had to be written by hand. The plugin API has also been changed to C++. Contact us if you have a plugin for Audacious that you want help updating.
Requested features:
- Double-size scaling of Winamp skins
- Searching by genre in the search tool plugin
- The playlist manager can be docked in the GTK+ interface
- Crossfading on seek and manual song change
- Support for “album artist” in song tags
- Search results are filtered by number of songs in the search tool plugin
- Cue files are automatically added to playlists and to the library
- Song lengths read from ID3 tags are sanity-checked
- Adjustable HTTP buffer size
- Optional calculation of a more accurate song length estimate for MP3 files
- Optional skipping of leading and trailing silence in MIDI files
- Restored settings dialog for the SID plugin
Other features and enhancements:
- Audacious can now be built as a headless music player “daemon” with no GTK+ dependency. It this configuration, it can be controlled using either audtool or your favorite MPRIS 2 client. Note that some plugins still require GTK+.
- By default, playback now resumes in a paused state upon startup, so that you can press play to continue from where you left off. If desired, there is still an option to resume immediately in an audibly playing state.
- It is now possible to sort a playlist by genre.
- A new “Open Containing Folder” command has been added to the GTK+ interface.
- Window positions of visualization plugins and of the search tool are now saved and restored at startup when the Winamp Classic interface is used. A new menu option and keyboard shortcut (Y) have also been added to activate the search tool.
- There is a new effect plugin to remove leading and trailing silence in any song file. Enabling this effect is recommended if you’re using crossfade.
- New controls have been added to the song information dialog to allow tagging entire albums without retyping the artist and album name for each song.
- A new option has been added to probe content of files with no recognized filename extension. With this option enabled, files with no extension can be added to playlists and to the library automatically, and subtunes in those files will also be recognized. The extra probing does slow Audacious down, so enable the option only if needed.
- Support for the SID song lengths database has been restored. Songlengths.txt should be installed in the same location as the C64 ROMs (generally /usr/share/sidplayfp/ on Linux).
- The ALSA output plugin now checks for new devices when the settings dialog is opened, so it’s no longer necessary to restart Audacious after plugging in a USB audio device.
- The JACK and sndio output plugins have been rewritten from scratch in order to fix a number of problems.
- Two new plugins have been added for native audio output and multimedia keyboard support on Mac OS X.
- The generic and unhelpful “No decoder found” message has been replaced with somewhat more specific error reporting; for example, “No such file or directory.”
And bug-fixes:
- MP4 decoding now uses FFmpeg instead of the deprecated libmp4ff
- Menus appear on the correct monitor under Windows
- Better tolerance for various character encoding errors
- Fixed an issue parsing ID3 text fields containing null characters
- Fixed a crash triggered by character encoding errors
- The user interface no longer freezes while the last song in the playlist fades out.
- A-to-B repeat correctly repeats from the end of the song if only point A is set.
- Fixed extreme CPU usage when copying and pasting thousands of playlist entries.
- MP3 files without Replay Gain tags are no longer amplified by 1 dB.
In this article I will show you how to install Audacious 3.6 on Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, Linux Mint 17 Qiana, Pinguy OS 14.04, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya, Deepin 2014, Peppermint Five, LXLE 14.04, Linux Lite 2 and other Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 derivative systems.
For both Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 (and derivative systems), Audacious 3.6 is available via two different PPAs, so installing it is easy. All you have to do is add the ppa to your system, update the local repository index and install the audacious and audacious-plugins packages. Follow the instructions for your system exactly, in order to get a successful installation.
How to install Audacious 3.6 on Ubuntu 14.10 and derivative systems:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install audacious audacious-plugins
How to install Audacious 3.6 on Ubuntu 14.04 and derivative systems:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install audacious audacious-plugins
Optional, to remove Audacious 3.6 from either Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 or derivative system, do:
$ sudo apt-get remove audacious audacious-plugins