Audacious

Overview

Audacious is a lightweight, open-source audio player focused on high audio quality and low resource usage. It supports a wide range of audio formats and provides a flexible plugin system for extending functionality.

Features

• Fast and lightweight with low system resource usage
• Runs on Linux, BSD derivatives, macOS and Windows
• Wide support for audio formats
• Plugin-based architecture
• Multiple user interfaces:
• GTK interface
• Qt interface
• Winamp interface, including support for Winamp 2 skins
• Advanced playlist management
• Built-in equalizer, audio effects and visualizations
• Support for ReplayGain and gapless playback
• Controllable also via MPRIS and with audtool

Installation

Prebuilt Packages

Most Linux distributions provide Audacious in their respective package repositories. For Windows we offer an installer. On macOS, Audacious can be installed using Homebrew.

There are also Flatpak and Snap packages of Audacious, however we do neither provide nor support them. So if you have an issue with these packages, make sure it also affects ordinary installation methods before reporting it to us.

See also the download instructions on our website.

Building from Source

Requirements

• Meson
• GCC or Clang
• pkg-config
• Required development libraries (GTK/Qt, GLib, audio backends, codecs, etc.)

Reading our build pipeline installation script may help with the package names when using Ubuntu or macOS.

Build Steps

After downloading the source code, you need to create a build directory (e.g. meson setup build). To view a list of all supported build options, you can use the command meson configure build. Alternatively inspect the file meson_options.txt. Logs can be found in meson-logs within your build directory.

Example:

meson setup build      # pass custom build options with -D option=value
meson compile -C build # start building
meson install -C build # install the built software

Consult the official Meson documentation for more details, e.g. Running Meson and Configuring a build directory.

Plugins

Audacious uses a modular plugin system to provide most of its functionality. Many plugins are included in the audacious-plugins package, officially provided and supported by the Audacious developers. But there are also third-party plugins available, install and use them at your own risk though.

Plugins can be enabled or disabled at runtime within the Audacious settings window. When using the GTK or Qt interface, several plugins (e.g. album cover, lyrics, file browser, visualizations) can be docked into the main window.

Plugin Types

• General plugins – provide additional features (e.g. lyrics viewer, last.fm, playlist manager)
• Effect plugins – apply audio processing (e.g. echo, equalizer, speed and pitch)
• Visualization plugins – display visual effects (e.g. spectrum analyzer, VU meter)
• Input plugins – decode audio formats (e.g. MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Opus)
• Output plugins – handle audio playback devices (e.g. ALSA, PipeWire, PulseAudio)
• Playlist plugins – offer support for various playlist formats (e.g. M3U, ASX, Cuesheets)
• Transport plugins – allow reading from streams or file shares (e.g. HTTPS, FTP, SMB)

Supported Formats

Supported audio formats depend on enabled plugins but typically include:

• MP3
• FLAC
• Ogg Vorbis
• Opus
• AAC / M4A
• WAV
• WavPack
• Ad-lib chiptunes
• Audio CD
• MIDI
• Nintendo DS (2SF)
• PlayStation Audio (PSF)
• Tracker formats (MOD, XM, etc.)
• … and many more (through FFmpeg)

Troubleshooting

• Read Common Problems on our website
• Make sure to use the latest Audacious version
• Enable verbose output (with audacious -V on the command line)
• Check our issue tracker and forum for similar reports (also closed ones)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

How to Contribute

• Submit pull requests for fixes or feature requests
• Support and help others in our forum
• Report issues in our bug tracker
• Translate Audacious into your native language
• Recommend and advertise Audacious to your friends

Before submitting large changes, consider opening a forum thread first to discuss your ideas. Also remember that the developers of Audacious are volunteers and can only spend a limited amount of their free time on the project.

License

Audacious is licensed under the BSD-2-Clause license. Please note that many of the plugins distributed with Audacious are under different licenses. See the COPYING file and the respective plugin source code for more details.

Links

• Homepage: https://audacious-media-player.org
• Source Code Repository: https://github.com/audacious-media-player
• Issue Tracker: https://github.com/audacious-media-player/audacious/issues
• Forum: https://github.com/orgs/audacious-media-player/discussions
• Translations: https://app.transifex.com/audacious