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Audacious music player is a fork of Beep Media Player (BMP), which itself forked from XMMS. It looks a lot like Winamp 2.x (and the playlist, song adding functions and so on, are similar to Winamp).

Audacious can play basically any kind of audio file, even game music console formats such as AY, GBS, GYM, HES, KSS, NSF, NSFE, SAP, SPC, VGM, VGZ, VTX.



What I like the most about Audacious is that it comes with some audio effect processing plugins, such as:

  • Can function as a LADSPA host
  • Audio Compression plugin (AudioCompressor AGC) to keep volume normalized at a specific level
  • Echo enhancing plugin
  • Crystallizer enhancing plugin
  • Stereo separation plugin
  • Voice Removal plugin
  • Sound stretching plugin
  • more





A full list of Audacious features can be found
HERE.



Audacious comes with two interfaces

Winamp-like interface:

audacious 2.3 screenshot



Audacious simple GTK interface:

audacious 2.3 screenshot



The latest version is 2.3.0, which doesn't bring many visual changes but a log of changes under the hood:
  • Decoders can be sorted by priority
  • Improved resampling support
  • Support for gapeless playback
  • Significantly revised the ALSA and OSS modules
  • Reworked the LADSPA module
  • Improved support for corrupt mp3s
  • The tray (notification area) icon works again
[changelog via linux.org.ru]




Install Audacious 2.3.0 in Ubuntu



Getdeb usually provides the latest Audacious packages for Ubuntu users, however the latest 2.3.0 is not yet available, so here is how to install Audacious 2.3.0 in Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid:

1. Add the WebUpd8 PPA
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8



2. Install Audacious 2.3.0
Then, run this to install Audacious 2.3:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install audacious


Update: Audacious 2.3.0 is now available in the official Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx repositories, so to install it all you have to do is paste this in a terminal:
sudo apt-get install audacious



For another Winamp-like music player for Linux, see qmmp