Development [LWN.net]

Getting Audacious

By Forrest Cook
November 7, 2007

It all started simply enough, your author has been playing with the recently released Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" release on several test machines. The plan is to migrate a number of machines that run older distributions, mainly Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn", over to Gutsy Gibbon. This will allow access to the latest and greatest application releases. The migration process is not new, a list of essential applications has been kept for a number of years over numerous distributions and distribution versions.

For a long time, one of the essential applications was XMMS, the X Multimedia System. XMMS is a basic music player with a Graphical User Interface that has always been a good tool for manually playing tracks from an online audio collection. The majority of the collection consists of FLAC files, with a few .wav, .mp3 and .ogg files thrown in for variety. Unfortunately, the Gutsy Gibbon release just deprecated xmms-flac, the flac file plugin for XMMS. XMMS is largely regarded as nearing the end of its useful life, distributions seem to be deprecating it in succession. Despite this, XMMS development has not stopped completely. The XMMS2 project was created to be a replacement for XMMS, but development seems to be moving slowly. The current XMMS2 development version (0.2) dates back to May 20, 2007.

A bit of digging through the Ubuntu Forums showed that other people were also missing the xmms-flac package. One of the more popular replacements was Audacious, not to be confused with the Audacity audio editor. Your author decided to be lazy and try something new instead of of spending time building a deprecated package. Audacious version 1.3.2 was installed from the Ubuntu repositories with no trouble. This lags the current release, which is at version 1.4.0.

Those who are familiar with XMMS will notice that Audacious has an almost identical look and feel. In fact, the project FAQ starts off by stating that: "Audacious is a fork of beep-media-player 0.9.7.1.", AKA XMMS. The basic Audacious package (on Ubuntu) includes decoder plugins for the following media types: Apple (AAC), CD FLAC, MP4, MPEG (MPC), Ogg Vorbis, WAV and WMA. Some basic visualization effects and a graphic equalizer are also included. Installing the Ubuntu audacious-plugins-extra package adds a number of interesting visualization and effects plugins.

Unfortunately, one nice XMMS feature that seems to be missing in Audacious is the Play Directory file selector that shows up when right-clicking the mouse on the Sample Rate/Stereo part of the display. To achieve the same functionality, one has to select Play File then select all of the files using the shift-right mouse combination. This also has the unexpected effect of causing an Add To Bookmarks/Show Hidden Files popup to show up. Besides that one missing feature, Audacious seems to do everything one would expect from XMMS.

As noted in the Ubuntu Forums, Audacious does seem to be a bit of a memory hog compared to XMMS. The top utility showed the Audacious Memory footprint to be around 21MB resident/ 200 MB virtual versus 8MB resident/ 45 MB virtual for XMMS. Code bloat is nothing unique to Audacious, fortunately the average amount of system RAM is also growing.

Audacious should easily take the place of XMMS on Gutsy Gibbon and forthcoming Ubuntu releases, it now has a place on your author's list of essential packages.

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