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.

Who needs XMMS/Audacious

Posted Nov 8, 2007 4:41 UTC (Thu) by palapa (guest, #612) [Link] (5 responses)

Try moc.  Client server architecture, Non-graphical.  Simple 2 pane interface.  Disgustingly
simple to generate a play list.  One doesn't need the 'interference' of a faux CD player
face-plate to play music.

Who needs XMMS/Audacious

Posted Nov 11, 2007 12:31 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (4 responses)

Or, try MPD. Minimalistic approach to music playing. Its client-server architecture consists of a daemon which does not require an X session, and a variety of clients (including console). It takes a bit to configure and gett used to it, but is definitely worth it.

You will never miss your music again while you debug that annoying xorg.conf problem.

Who needs XMMS/Audacious

Posted Nov 11, 2007 21:26 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

Plus, even if you have half a dozen clients going at once (what? is 
something *wrong* with that?) they'll all agree on what's being played and 
all agree on the set of available music.

There are some things it can't yet do (e.g. realtime feedback to clients 
of the current playing position) but these are surely implementable (in 
fact there's a page on the wiki devoted to designing a realtime feedback 
interface).

Who needs XMMS/Audacious

Posted Nov 11, 2007 22:05 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, maybe not realtime, but they sure know what's going on pretty quick. Maybe I don't understand your scenario.

If I have gmpc open, it displays the current playing position accurately, and updates it every second. Then if I issue an mpc pause from the terminal, gmpc changes status to "paused" at the same time. It works with mpc seek -10 too: the visual feedback on gmpc is quite fast.

Who needs XMMS/Audacious

Posted Nov 11, 2007 23:02 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

The problem is that they do this by polling: by repeatedly asking mpd 
`where am I?'.

There should be a mechanism whereby mpd clients can wait on the server 
connection and be informed of events of interest, but no such mechanism 
exists. (emms, at least, would benefit from this, because the client is a 
singlethreaded Emacs that is possibly doing a lot of other things of 
greater importance, so really cannot poll: but if it was fed events of 
interest by the server it could just use a process sentinel to consume 
them very efficiently.)

Who needs XMMS/Audacious

Posted Nov 12, 2007 7:19 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Oh, I get it, not too elegant. So the wishlist item is not so much "realtime" as "event-driven" feedback...

Anyway, the thing is that you have a lot of clients, and chances are there is one implemented for your favorite desktop. You can load it as a full application, as an applet on the taskbar, as a command line utility, as a webapp, or as (live and learn) an emacs extension. And, as nix explained, you can use several at the same time and keep them synchronized (albeit at a small cost in polling the daemon).

Grammar police

Posted Nov 8, 2007 15:14 UTC (Thu) by daveho (guest, #29105) [Link] (4 responses)

I count *four* run-on sentences in the first two paragraphs.

A grammatical error once in a while is understandable, everyone makes them, but they get a bit
distracting when they're too frequent, LWN is the best Linux publication out there, I think
you guys can do better, don't you agree?

Grammar police

Posted Nov 8, 2007 16:17 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Seconded. Jake Edge had so many errors in one paragraph of his otherwise 
excellent kernel page post that I had to jump back and skip the entire 
paragraph. That sort of thing doesn't make for easy reading :/

Grammar police

Posted Nov 8, 2007 16:26 UTC (Thu) by jake (editor, #205) [Link] (1 responses)

Polite notes with *specific* gripes about grammar should be sent to lwn@lwn.net.  I think you
will find we are very responsive to such things.

thanks!

jake

Grammar police

Posted Nov 9, 2007 18:50 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Oh, I know, I was just grumbling pointlessly. I thought it would be 
obvious, I guess. Apologies.

(correction note sent.)

Grammar police

Posted Nov 9, 2007 8:08 UTC (Fri) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link]

A grammatical error once in a while is understandable, everyone makes them, but they get a bit distracting when they're too frequent, LWN is the best Linux publication out there, I think you guys can do better, don't you agree?

If that was supposed to be humor, I may be too crude to catch it. It just looks amazingly rude, to me.

Getting Audacious

Posted Nov 8, 2007 16:08 UTC (Thu) by Tet (guest, #5433) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm disappointed that they feel the need to deprecate xmms-flac. Why? It's a free software
application that works. What's there to deprecate? Still, a) the source is available, so I can
compile my own should Fedora also choose to deprecate it, and b) I guess that audacious is
always an option...

Getting Audacious

Posted Nov 8, 2007 22:29 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

It's not just xmms-flac that's going to be deprecated, it's xmms. The problem is that it's basically dead upstream; xmms2 is NOT equivalent. Thus, the distribution package maintainers would be on the hook for security fixes. Additionally, xmms is one of the few remaining gtk1 apps, gtk1 is dead upstream, and thus they'd be on the hook for gtk1 maintenance as well.

Audacious is probably the closest thing to xmms functionality and interface, althought it's NOT a drop-in replacement - you can't intermix the plugins, and the socket interface is different, IIRC.

Playing directories

Posted Nov 8, 2007 19:01 UTC (Thu) by odie (guest, #738) [Link]

Pointing the play file dialog to a directory and pressing the open button plays the entire
directory with all its subdirectories, just like the play directory feature of XMMS.

Getting Audacious

Posted Nov 9, 2007 15:39 UTC (Fri) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link]

A new release of alsaplayer was just announced:

http://lwn.net/Articles/257272

Why is this article on the Development page, anyway?

Getting Audacious

Posted Nov 15, 2007 15:36 UTC (Thu) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]

As a long time xmms user, I too tried switching to audacious more than once, due to xmms's
deprecation.

I just couldn't stand how slow it was. Scrolling was slow. Loading metadata was slow. The
title scrolling wasn't even smooth.

Now, I'm on a fairly old machine, granted (2xPII 400), but I am really disappointed that a
thing as simple as playing my not-massive (~900 track) playlist has to be made such a chore
with modern software. It's not as though playing a 900 track playlist wasn't a regular task in
1999.

As it is, I'm currently coping with a slowly crumbling xmms, but I suspect I will have to
switch to an mpd solution.