Audacious 3.2.2 Review for Linux

Audacious for Linux is a free software audio player with a focus on low resource usage, high audio quality, and support for a wide range of audio formats.

Codec Support

• MP3
• Advanced Audio Coding (AAC and AAC+)
• Vorbis
• FLAC
• Wavpack
• Musepack
• TTA (codec)
• Windows Media Audio (WMA)
• Apple Lossless (ALAC)
• 150 different module formats
• Several chiptune formats: AY, GBS, GYM, HES, KSS, NSF, NSFE, SAP, SPC, VGM, VGZ, VTX
• PlayStation Audio: PSF1 and PSF2
• Nintendo DS Sound Format: 2SF
• Ad-lib chiptunes via AdPlug library
• WAV formats provided by sndfile plugin.
• MIDI via native OS synthesizer control or TiMidity.
• CD Audio

Plugins

Audacious owes a large portion of its functionality to plugins, including all codecs. More features are available via third-party plugins:

• Decoder plugins, which contain the actual codecs used for decoding content.
• Transport plugins, which are lowlevel and implemented by the VFS layer.
• General plugins, which provide user-added services to the player (such as sending tracks with AudioScrobbler)
• Output plugins, which provide the audio system backend of the player.
• Visualization plugins, which provide visualizations based on fast Fourier transforms of the wave data.
• Effect plugins, which provide various sound processing on the decoded audio stream
• Container plugins, which provide support for playlists and other similar structures.
• Lowlevel plugins, which provide miscellaneous services to the player core and are not categorized into any of the other plugins.

Skins

Audacious has full support for Winamp 2 skins, and as of version 1.2, some free-form skinning is possible. Winamp .wsz skin files, a type of Zip archive, can be used directly, or can be unarchived to individual directories. The program can use Windows Bitmap (.bmp) graphics from the Winamp archive, although native skins for Linux are usually rendered in Portable Network Graphics (.png) format. Audacious 1.x allows the user to adjust the RGB color balance of any skin, effectively making a basic white skin equivalent to millions of skins of different hues.

Clients

Audacious is intended to be a media player and not a client (unlike XMMS2), though it supports the concept of other clients connecting to it, such as Conky.

Connection to Audacious for remote control can be done over plain DBus, by using an MPRIS-compatible client, or using the official Audtool utility created just for this purpose.