Audacious 3.2 Beta Released With New Music Library Plugin, Ubuntu Sound Menu / GNOME Shell Mediaplayer (MPRIS v2) Support

6:44 PM


Audacious is a highly configurable music player for GNOME that has a very low memory footprint and comes with many plugins as well as two interfaces: a GTK and a Winamp2-like interface (it also supports Winamp 2 skins).


Audacious 3.2 beta has been released recently, featuring a new music library plugin which lets you search your whole music collection and easily create playlists. 

The new beta also finally adds partial MPRIS v2 support which allows Audacious to integrate with the Ubuntu Sound Menu or GNOME Shell (via extensions like GNOME Shell Mediaplayer).




Other changes in Audacious 3.2 beta since 3.1.x:
  • GTK interface improvements: a new button to toggle the new quick search on/off, buttons to close and add new playlist tabs, a drop-down menu to enable and disable visualization plugins, and a menu item to remove unavailable files from the playlist
  • Many changes related to handling large playlists (tens of thousands of entries) efficiently
  • Startup time, memory usage, and disk writes reduced signigicantly

The playlists created under Audacious 3.2 are not supported by older Audacious versions so once you install it, if you go back to older Audacious versions you won't be able to use any newly created playlists!

The new MPRIS plugin should be enabled by default (if somehow it's not, go to File > Preferences > Plugins > General and enable the "MPRIS 2 Server" plugin) - this plugin is required if you want Audacious to show up in the Ubuntu Sound Menu / GNOME Shell mediaplayer extensions.

The new search tool plugin is not enabled by default, so to enable it, go to File > Preferences > Plugins > General and enable the "Search Tool" plugin.



Install Audacious 3.2 beta in Ubuntu


The latest Audacious 3.2 beta is available in the WebUpd8 Unstable PPA, for Ubuntu 11.10 and 12.04 - add it and install Audacious 3.2 beta using the commands below:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audacious


To use Audacious with GNOME Shell Mediaplayer installed from extensions.gnome.org, you need to edit the extension metadata file (until the extension is updated to support it) called "metadata.json" which is located under:
~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/mediaplayer@patapon.info and add "audacious" under the "players" list. This is not required if you've installed the extension from the WebUpd8 GNOME3 PPA.


And speaking of Audacious, a new stable version was released too: 3.1.2 which doesn't come with any new features and only includes bug fixes. This new version is already is available in the main WebUpd8 PPA, so if you don't want to install the beta and want to use the latest stable Audacious 3.1.2 in Ubuntu 11.10 or 12.04, use the commands below:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audacious


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

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