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Goodbye XMMS, Hello Audacious?

27 October 2006

XMMS is one of the best known audio players for Linux. It is very similar in function to the classic Winamp (i.e. before AOL bought it and ruined it).

This groovy little app. has played an important part of my computing routine for the last half-decade, and although Gstreamer is becoming more-and-more important as the default media framework for the Gnome desktop, Gnome has not yet provided any real Gstreamer-based challengers to XMMS' pride of place as my music player or mplayer as my video player.

Trouble in paradise

This week XMMS has been pulled from Gentoo Linux, it had been hard-masked and is on the way out. Soon it will be completely gone from portage with no trace it was ever there.

When I first realised that XMMS had gone from portage I was shocked and a little incensed, however after some post-traumatic rantings on Gentoo's Bugzilla, I bit my pride and installed the recommended replacement, Audacious.

Bye Bye XMMS

Completely removing XMMS from Gentoo seemed a bit excessive, akin to removing OpenOffice or Firefox.

However, there are actually some good reasons for it. Firstly, XMMS is not under active development, deprecated in favour of the forthcoming XMMS2. Secondly, XMMS has a number of outstanding bugs. Thirdly, no one has volunteered to maintain XMMS in Gentoo. That last one is usually always fatal.

Hello Audacious

Audacious is not bad at all, the title logo on the default skin of Audacious got on my nerves, but apart from this minor niggle, everything worked very well. It is not only a drop-in replacement for XMMS, but also the menus are a lot easier to read than XMMS, being properly integrated with my desktop.

Themes created for XMMS can just drop into place, and the application seemed to notice the theme I use and load it into place. Gentoo provides a large selection of themes, in the package called, you guessed it, audacious- themes.

Other Audacious packages are available too. Some examples: audacious- docklet puts an icon in your system tray, audacious-plugins provides optional extra features and audtty provides command-line controls.

All credit to the audacious team for thinking through how users can migrate from XMMS to audacious. Everything works the same and it is as if audacious is just an update to XMMS.

Audacious is, in fact, a fork of Beep Media Player which in turn is a fork of XMMS. So although the code has gone through many changes in the process, Audacious remains true to what made XMMS so good in the first place.

I am slightly worried about the lack of a port for ARM (Used in many Embedded Systems, the Nokia 770 and the GP2X) and for ia64 (Itanium), these platforms have now lost XMMS but have yet to gain Audacious.

Update: a Gentoo developer told me that Audacious would probably work but they have not found testers yet. This is hardly suprising as most IA64 installs are likely to be servers and most ARM users are likely to be some integrated Linux rather than Gentoo.

Screenshots

Spot the difference, one of these is Audacious and one is XMMS:

Stop the difference, two media players

Did you guess which one? Maybe this will make it easier, here I have reset Audacious to its default theme:

Stop the difference, two media players again

The theme I have been using for quite a while with XMMS was automatically detected by Audacious and made available to me:

Stop the difference, two media players again

Here are the menus that I referred to earlier:

Here is XMMS:

Menu of XMMS

Here is Audacious in all its Gnome glory:

Menu of Audacious

Here are the preferences dialogs of the two applications:

XMMS (click to enlarge):

Preferences - Click to Enlarge

Audacious (click to enlarge):

Prefences Window - Click to Enlarge

Conclusion

It has worked out rather well. So give it a go, as the advert for a fizzy drink points out, 'what's the worst that can happen?'.

1 g2boojum says...

Just out of curiosity, where did the default xmms theme for audacious come from?

Posted at 8:37 p.m. on October 27, 2006


2 Zeth says...

It seems the Gentoo devs were genuinely shocked by the reaction of the Users, concerning the removal of XMMS, so much so they have put out an official Statement justifying their behaviour, which seems to be a first.

Posted at 12:31 a.m. on November 2, 2006


3 aquo says...

http://gentoo-wiki.com/Xmms_replacement

The goal was to find a replacement for media-sound/xmms on a Gentoo system with Xfce.

My requirements were:

  • graphical interface (Unicode support appreciated).
  • available in stable gentoo, no unmasking (~x86) needed.
  • not a KDE application.
  • no dependencies on large amount of gnome-packages (gstreamer is OK).
  • no dependencies on multimedia applications for video playing.
  • a recent release and a supporting community.

Please note that these requirements are my requirements, your opinion may vary.

I tried to evaluate 6 different programs:

4 were masked as unstable so not tested.

So now there are only two candidates for the replacement of xmms, I just will make a short comment on both. Audacious seems for me the better choice. The program tries to be a xmms look-alike, handling large amount of audio files distributed along the filesystem seems to be much more easy than with rhythmbox. Forward and backward moving inside an audio file with the cursor keys is possible, but has some delay, the program is still going forward after the cursor key is released.

The version of Rhythmbox has very bad usability. It is impossible to create playlist from filesystem folders, playlist management is centered on a central repository. Adding the files to the central repository is slow. As rhythmbox uses the normal GTK widgets, the filelist is not compact, and it is impossible to change the font-size to present more songs on the playlist. Changing between different songs is slow. Preferences are nearly not existing. There is no support for editing ID3 tags. The available version is more than two years old. Sometimes the programs stops working with Segmentation fault. I do not like this version, maybe newer releases are better.

The situation for Gentoo now looks very bad. Audacious is not bad, but it is the only available program to replace xmms. The decision to mask xmms without taking care for an upgrade path seems dull to me. Audio players seem to be neglected within Gentoo.

Posted at 10:36 p.m. on November 9, 2006


4 Michael Altfield says...

When I first heard that XMMS was becoming deprecated and masked (eventually removed) from the portage tree, I was devastated.

Then I found amarok, feel in love, and threw XMMS into history where it belongs. I love my music, I love last.fm, and--now--I love amoark.

Posted at 2:57 a.m. on May 4, 2007


5 Elmo says...

But Audacious no longer (as of 1.3x) saves MP3 streams to disk!! THis is a must have feature! Does anyone know out there how to save a stream to disk without using XMMS, or the new version of Audacious. I tried Amarok, but this didn't have the "Save stream to disk" WHILE LISTENING to the stream feature.

Posted at 5:41 p.m. on June 24, 2007


6 gnuorder says...

Elmo, have you tried streamripper? It's in portage in addition to GTK and KDE frontends.

Posted at 3:40 p.m. on August 2, 2007


7 TenPlus1 says...

Xmms will always be in my heart, but from here on Audacious will become my defauly music player... My only wish, a WinCUE-a-like plugin to quickly search music titles (via directory/filenames) and a lower memory footprint...

Posted at 8:10 p.m. on January 30, 2008


8 Elmo says...

gnuorder: audacious WONT play streamripper relayed file. yeah, it's about two years later, and they still haven't don't anything about supporting streaming. Try it yourself: streamripper http://205.188.215.228:8018 -r -d /tmp audacious http://127.0.0.1:8000 Audacious blocks and finally fails stating that it cannot play the file. id3_file_vfsopen: file failed ERROR: neon: neon.c:599 (open_request): <0x9ac4b00> Could not open URL: 6 ERROR: neon: neon.c:885 (neon_aud_vfs_fopen_impl): <0x9ac4b00> Could not open URL

Posted at 6:20 p.m. on April 1, 2008


9 FLACvest says...

Hello fellow netizens,

I came by a circuitous route in the Linux Audio Player World... but mainly have been an Amarok (closest to iTunes) then MPD/Sonata Fan and now an Audacious Fan.

(I love the GTK+ widget landscape so its no big surprise that I love the Murrine GTK engine and a particular Murrina, VerdeOlivo. That being Said search for "Olive" on Gnome-Look.org and you'll fine a BMP skin for it that works for audacious and is mighty handsome and fits with VerdeOlivo).

What I like about Audacious is that there's a new Xfce Goodies Panel Plugin "Xfce4 Playercontrol Plugin" to replace the "XMMS Contol Plugin" that turned me on to Audacious-- it controls Audacious or MPD... a shoe-in for me!

So I decided to cozy up to Audacious a little and found the LADSPA HOST!!! the Multiband EQ had been recommended to me with much enthusiasm, so I played with it, tuning it to my Phonak Audeo PFE 122's very carefully and then I added the Crossfade (4 outputs). It gives sound almost as nice as my Headphone amps with a crossfeed circuit.

Audacious is really a sweet app, plus it has a PulseAudio Driver, Best Sinc Interpolation, and if your card can handle it, 24 bit samples!

ENJOY!!

Heres my Audacious Setup:

50Hz gain (low shelving): 7.0 #---> 8.5 (bassier)
100Hz gain: 5.0 #---> 6.0 (bassier)
156Hz gain: 3.0 #---> 3.5 (bassier)
220Hz gain: 2.5
311Hz gain: 1.5
440Hz gain: 0.0
622Hz gain: -2.5
880Hz gain: -5.0
1250Hz gain: -7.5
1750Hz gain: -10.0
2500Hz gain: -7.5
3500Hz gain: -5.0
5000Hz gain: -2.5
10000 gain: 0.0
20000Hz gain: 2.0
latency: 768.0

Posted at 7:23 a.m. on March 2, 2009


10 Gasha says...

I love to save streams from radio stations, like rautemusik.fm WHILE listening. This was showstopper for me - so i just grabbed last source tarball xmms-1.2.11 and compiled standalone binary in /usr/local/bin. Long live XMMS forever!

Posted at 10:37 p.m. on July 14, 2009


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