Saturday, October 24, 2015

Install Audacious 3.5 In Ubuntu 14.04 Or 13.10 (PPA)

Audacious is an audio player that focuses on high audio quality and low resource usage which comes with a pretty large plugin list as well as two interfaces: a GTK interface and a Winamp 2.x like interface (and so, it supports Winamp 2.x skins).

Audacious 3.5 Ubuntu GTK interface
Audacious GTK interface
Audacious 3.5 Ubuntu Winamp interface
Audacious Winamp classic interface

Audacious 3.5 was released recently and comes with quite a few new features as well as bug fixes:
  • Unified settings page for switching and configuring interfaces;
  • New menu items go directly to various plugin categories in settings window;
  • Delete songs from the filesystem or move them to the trash;
  • Switch playlists by scrolling on the tab bar;
  • Option to show number of entries in playlist tabs;
  • Support for Microsoft ASXv3 playlists;
  • Option to hide tab bar when there is only one playlist;
  • Alarm plugin provides new "Set Alarm" menu item;
  • New settings window for JACK output;
  • ID3v2.3 tags are no longer converted to the newer but less portable ID3v2.4 format;
  • New audtool commands for working with multiple playlists;
  • Default tag format for MP3 files changed from APEv2 to ID3v2.3;
  • Support for COVERART element in Ogg Vorbis tags;
  • Album art enlarges with the song info window;
  • Opening a folder in a new playlist automatically sets the playlist title;
  • Most dialog windows now remember their position and size;
  • Full support for Unicode filenames on Windows;
  • OpenGL spectrum visualization works in Windows.

Also, Audacious 3.5 comes with some under the hood changes which should "make the software easier to maintain in the future": Audacious has migrated from dbus-glib to the newer GDBus library, libaudgui has been expanded to replace some of the functions that were deprecated in GTK 3.10, etc. and as a consequence, some features were removed - MPRIS 1.0 is no longer supported (Audacious supports MPRIS 2.0), libaudclient is no longer included and MIDI playback to hardware synthesizers via ALSA is no longer supported.

For a complete changelog, see the Audacious 3.5 release announcement.


Install Audacious 3.5 in Ubuntu 14.04 or 13.10


Audacious needs to be patched to work properly in Ubuntu, even for the latest Ubuntu 14.04 (though for Trusty, the change is minor). Until now, I patched it heavily to get it to work (mostly to get ffaudio to work properly, but not only) with Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, etc. but unfortunately I couldn't get the latest Audacious 3.5 to compile with Ubuntu versions older than 13.10. 

That's why Audacious 3.5 is available in the main failsdownloads PPA for Ubuntu 14.04 and 13.10 only. Still, the PPA has Audacious 3.4.3 for Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10.

To add the main failsdownloads PPA and install Audacious 3.5 in Ubuntu 14.04 or 13.10, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/failsdownloads
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audacious

For other Linux distributions and Windows, see the Audacious downloads page.
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