14 DAY TRIAL // One of the most used audio players on the Linux platform, Audacious, has just received a major update and a ton of features, most of them being requested by the community.
Audacious may be a very popular audio player, but the developers are not upgrading it as often as they should. This means that when a new version is promoted, the release tends to be stuffed with new features and improvements.
“Audacious plays your music how you want it, without stealing away your computer’s resources from other tasks. Drag and drop folders and individual song files, search for artists and albums in your entire music library, or create and edit your own custom playlists.”
“Listen to CDs or stream music from the Internet. Tweak the sound with the graphical equalizer or experiment with LADSPA effects. Enjoy the modern GTK-themed interface or change things up with Winamp Classic skins. Use the plugins included with Audacious to fetch lyrics for your music, to set an alarm in the morning, and more,” reads the official website.
The number of features requested by the community is actually quite impressive and the developers managed to implement a lot of them. For example, it's now possible to delete songs from the filesystem and move them to the trash, users are now able to switch playlists by scrolling on the tab bar, the option to show the number of entries in playlist tabs has been added, and support has been added for Microsoft's ASXv3 playlists.
Also, the Alarm plugin provides a new “Set Alarm” menu item, a settings window has been added for the JACK output, ID3v2.3 tags are now converted properly to the newer but less portable ID3v2.4 format, the default tag format for MP3 files has changed from APEv2 to ID3v2.3, album art now enlarges with the song info window, and a single settings page has been implemented for switching and configuring interfaces.
The developers also had to remove some features, like the support for MPRIS 1.0, which was a very old version. MIDI playback to hardware synthesizers via ALSA is no longer possible and the libaudclient library is no longer included.
We took a closer look at the previous Audacious version and we have a comprehensive review in place if you want to find out more details about the application.
A complete list of changes and improvements can be found in the announcement. You can download the Audacious 3.5 sources right now from Softpedia.