Audacious (music player)
Ever since the decay of XMMS started to become obvious, quite a few years ago, I’ve been looking for a replacement, the ideal music player that would fit my needs perfectly. It was a long and difficult journey, but I finally think I may be getting to an end. Here’s the story of how I got to meet Audacious.
Oh, and sorry if I seem biased. It’s because I am. My own preferences are quite personal.
1. The player that never was: XMMS
Today, looking back, I can definitely say that my relation with XMMS has been a hate and love mix from day one. To have an application so close to being great and yet fall just short of it is enough to drive you nuts.
1.1. The hate…
What was wrong with XMMS? Oh, where should I start.
- Perhaps the biggest issue is that it never switched to GTK v2, in spite of some brief-lived patches that tried to accomplish this. I seriously doubt it would’ve been such a complicated matter to make the conversion. It wasn’t trivial either, though, and by the time GTK v2 started becoming the new standard interest in XMMS development was already very low. On today’s desktops, the XMMS dialog windows and menus, with their awkward antiquated style, stick out like a sore thumb. The file open dialogue is pathetic. It doesn’t have anti-aliased fonts.
- It has all kinds of little issues that taken one by one are passable, but once they start flocking together they irk the hell out of me.
- The three separate windows never seemed to quite respect the standards and give a hard time to many window managers and taksbars out there.
- It crashes if you attempt to use certain bitmap fonts in the playlist or play window.
- The jump to and queue features are crippled.
- To this day, my setup can’t handle MP4/AAC files correctly (ie. play them). And so on and so forth.
1.2. …and the love
And yet, so very much was right with XMMS:
- It was pure genius that it adopted the Winamp 2.x interface style. And not only this, it can also make straightforward use of Winamp skins and equalizer settings. Say what you will, for a music player, the Winamp 2.x interface was absolutely wonderful. It had the basic requirements in all the right shape and size: a playlist, an equalizer and a control panel that were easy to use and intuitive.
- Over the years there were a lot of plugins developed for it. I don’t want my music player to be a kitchen sink (ie. stray from playing music), yet there’s all kinds of features related to playing music that I do want. I was glad I could use XMMS in the following ways: CD player (complete with digital extraction), transcoder and ripper (from music files or CD tracks to several popular formats like Ogg or MP3), remote control via LIRC or with the keyboard multimedia keys, Last.fm/AudioScrobbler connection, sound normalization and enhancement.
2. I want a music player
Of course, there are replacements that have been spreading. Yet few of them are music players, and of those not many are up to par. Too few plugins, not enough features, not enough supported file formats, not good enough interface.
Most of the ones that became very successful are in fact media libraries, a concept quite a bit different from what I want. I don’t need a library that holds all my music and swamps me with CD covers, lyrics, fancy visualisations, rankings, favorites and whatnot. I need a music player, one that looks and feels like XMMS done right.
I want to pop in a CD or open a hard-drive directory and to just push “play”. I want skins, but I want the Winamp 2.x and XMMS interface. I want support for all kinds of music files, but not if it means installing two dozen Gstreamer packages. I want all kinds of functionality, but I want it in small tasty bites, not something that resembles a huge bowl of spaghetti. Finally, I don’t want a player that can expand to full screen. Full screen scares me. I want something small and pretty.
3. The search for an alternative
It’s not a surprise that the answer turned up in the form of what we could call “the grandson of XMMS”. The following is my trek along the “XMMS connection”.
When the lack of interest for dragging XMMS kicking and screaming into the 21st century became apparent there were all kinds of attempts to deal with this. None of the them were particularly successful:
- XMMS 2.x itself was taking things into a different direction. It was slated to become a media server, an application that would play your music in the background and need a 3rd-party frontend that you can actually call a player. There are all kinds of advantages to this approach, apparently. But I just want my music player. I tried XMMS 2.x and various frontends. The magic wasn’t there. The frontends were what mattered to me, not the backend, and they were Just Not It.
- At some point, a brave team took the XMMS 1.x code and started hacking it in all the right ways. They ported it to GTK v2 and started revamping all the dialogues in sensible ways, at the same time keeping the Winamp 2.x interface and skin support that made XMMS (and Winamp) famous. It was called Beep Media Player (BMP). I felt the spark of new love bloom, yet BMP fell short of loving me back. There weren’t enough plugins ported for it. I have grown to take certain ones for granted with XMMS and I discovered I couldn’t live without them. The BMP team expected plugin authors to switch over themselves, but they never did, and the BMP people didn’t pick them up themselves, aside from an essential handful.
- Then BMP also fell victim to a split. Thus appeared BMPx (aka BMP2). But it was not a music player, it was a media library application, featuring a library, tags, relations, history, flows(?) and all the things I never wanted. At the same time it didn’t have my beloved plugins, nor the good old interface. Dead end.
4. The Holy Grail: Audacious
Until, finally, there was sunshine. The other half of the team left over from the ruins of BMP picked it up and kept it running, this time under the name Audacious. And there was much joy, because it looked like I’ve finally found Paradise.
Let me count the ways I love Audacious:
- It’s mature. It is reaching version 1.2.0 as I speak, in its own timeline. It is no longer just an XMMS clone or a BMP fork. I say it’s here to stay, for as long as the core developers are willing to stick by it.
- It has the Winamp skin support and the exact same interface consacrated by XMMS, complete with preset compatibility (I just copied the file over).
- It is based on GTK v2, and the menus, file dialogues and preferences are a joy to behold.
- It allows me to use whatever fonts I want in both the playlist and the control window, and it antialiases them.
- There were small but significant changes in the playlist, such as the graphical separation of track numbers and total length from the titles, as well as easy customization of the title meta format.
- The playlist bottom buttons are done right, the way they were in Winamp. In XMMS, you had to press and hold the mouse button, otherwise you’d end up activating the bottom-most entry by mistake. In Audacious you no longer have to strain your fingers to keep the menus open, they open with a single click and stay open, and they are beautiful, GTK v2 menus, complete with icons.
- To add insult to injury, the bottom entry in the XMMS playlist buttons wasn’t the one most people expected. In Audacious, however, the bottom entry is the “right” one: add files, remove selected, and select all, respectively, and I can activate it quickly with a double-click.
- Audacious It has all the right plugins in a single source package, which sometimes gets organized by distro’s in a basic one and an extra package. It has support for all the music formats I need, including MP3, Ogg, FLAC, MP4/AAC, WMA, MIDI and a handful of tracker formats such as XM, MOD or IT, of which I have a great collection. It has remote control support and Last.fm and everything I wanted, with more plugins being ported all the time.
- It behaves and interacts properly with modern tasklists, window managers and panels.
- It can actually handle streaming properly! A lot better than XMMS. I can now finally use Audacious as the player of choice together with StreamTuner (I was forced to use MPlayer in an aterm before).
- Last but not least, the About window is stylish and a joy to behold. How shallow, you’ll say. But I take my visual desktop experience seriously.
4.1. More plugins
Normally, if you install the regular Audacious packages, you’ll get a whole load of plugins. Make sure to get the “extra-plugins” package as well (or whatever your distribution calls it), it has a lot of goodies.
However, there are certain plugins that can only be obtained by compiling from source. I’m making a list of how I managed to get my grubby little hands on some of the most interesting of them.
- Crystality is an Effect plugin that attempts to enhance the quality of the sound by means of a bandwidth extender, harmonic booster and 3D echo.
- You can find the source package that’s supposed to work with Audacious rather easily. However, it’s still not fully ported over. You will also need this patch to get it to compile.