Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Audacious 3.6 Released, Install It In Ubuntu Or Linux Mint

Audacious is a fast, open source audio player. A decendant of XMMS, Audacious focuses on high audio quality and low system resource usage and it ships with numerous plugins for various purposes, such as effects, visualisation, desktop integration and more. The player ships with a GTK and a Winamp 2.x-like interface and, with the latest version, a new Qt interface.

Audacious 3.6 was released recently and with this version, the developers have decided to switch back to GTK2 by default. 

Audacious 3.6 GTK2 interface

Besides using GTK2 by default, the latest Audacious release also ships with an optional Qt-based user interface that can be installed alongside the GTK interface. The goal is to completely switch to Qt at some point and for now, the Qt interface is not as feature-rich as the GTK interface, so it should only be used for testing:

Audacious 3.6 Qt interface

The Qt interface will also be used in a future Audacious port for Mac OS X.

For the 3.6 release, the Audacious developers have provided a separate GTK3 tarball but this will probably be dropped in future releases. For this reason, the Audacious packages from the main failsdownloads PPA are built with GTK2 (the Qt interface is also enabled in the PPA builds so you can launch either of them from the menu, but not both in the same time).

Besides the whole GTK2/GTK3/Qt changes, Audacious 3.6 also brings new features and various improvements:
  • upscaling of old winamp skins was brought back;
  • it's now possible to search the library by genre;
  • it's now possible to sort a playlist by genre;
  • the playlist manager can be docked in the GTK interface;
  • Crossfade plugin now works on manual song change;
  • 'Album Artist' is now supported in song tags;
  • search results can be filtered by number of songs in the search tool plugin;
  • cue files are now automatically added to playlists and to the library;
  • song lengths read from ID3 tags are sanity-checked;
  • the HTTP buffer size is now adjustable;
  • restored settings dialog for the SID plugin;
  • Audacious can now be built as a headless music player "daemon" with no GTK+ dependency (and it can be controlled via audtool or MPRIS 2 client) - some plugins still require GTK though;
  • by default, playback now resumes in a paused state upon startup, so that you can press play to continue from where you left off;
  • a new "Open Containing Folder" command has been added to the GTK+ interface;
  • window positions of visualization plugins and of the search tool are now saved and restored at startup when the Winamp Classic interface is used. A new menu option and keyboard shortcut (Y) have also been added to activate the search tool;
  • there is a new effect plugin to remove leading and trailing silence in any song file (especially useful for the crossfade plugin);
  • new controls have been added to the song information dialog to allow tagging entire albums without retyping the artist and album name for each song;
  • a new option has been added to probe content of files with no recognized filename extension;
  • support for the SID song lengths database has been restored;
  • the ALSA output plugin now checks for new devices when the settings dialog is opened;
  • the JACK and sndio output plugins have been rewritten from scratch in order to fix a number of problems;
  • the generic and unhelpful “No decoder found” message has been replaced with somewhat more specific error reporting; for example, "No such file or directory";
  • bug fixes.


Install Audacious 3.6 in Ubuntu 14.04, 14.10 or 15.04 / Linux Mint 17 or 17.1


Ubuntu 14.04, 14.10 and 15.04 / Linux Mint 17 and 17.1 (and derivatives) users can install the latest Audacious 3.6 by using the main failsdownloads PPA. The PPA provides Audacious with the GTK2 and Qt interfaces!

To add the PPA and install Audacious, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/failsdownloads
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audacious

With this release, users who install Audacious from the main failsdownloads PPA will find two Audacious entries in the menu/Dash: one called "Audacious" which can be used to launch Audacious with the GTK2 interface and another one called "Audacious Qt Interface" which is self explanatory.

If you don't want to add the PPA or you're not using Ubuntu / Linux Mint, you can download the latest Audacious 3.6 source as well as Windows binaries from its website, .
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