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

XMMS preferences

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.

1.2. …and the love

And yet, so very much was right with XMMS:

2. I want a music player

Not media libraries and servers

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:

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:

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.