Install Audacious in Ubuntu, An Advanced Audio Player for GNU Linux

XMMS was a hit, oh yeah, she received a lot of attention :P. It was one of the default audio players that used to come with the major GNU Linux distributions in those days (I first used it in Red-Hat Linux, forgot the version :D).

But I'm not quite sure why, to this day it does play almost all the audio formats but for some reason it was replaced by few other contenders such as Rhythmbox and Banshee for instance. May be it was due to that "WinAmp" looking Skin... I guess.

Audacious...

Anyhow, if you want an audio player that loads quickly and needs little PC resources in comparison with others, then you should try Audacious!. It also has a GUI which is very similar to the WinAmp but if you don't like that at all, then it can be customized to look like Banshee as well.

Main features...

*. Well, supports almost all the audio codecs - mp3, aac, vorbis, flac, wma, ALAC, etc.

*. Plugin support - meaning that you can expand its capabilities such as adding sound effects or enhancements, etc.

*. Transcoding/converting into various formats such as Flac, AAC, Vorbis, mp3.

*. Few effects (voice cancellation, echo, equalizers, etc).

*. Different visualizations support.

*. Live audio streaming.

*. Last.FM integration via plugins... are just a few to name.

If you run Ubuntu (10.10 in this example), then this is how you install it.

1. Open your terminal and issue the below command (we have to add the Audacious "repository" to the synaptic manager first).

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://getdeb.masio.com.mx/ jaunty/' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"

2. Now, enter the below command to install Audacious.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install audacious audacious-plugins-extra audacious-plugins

Enjoy!.