Frequently Asked Questions
- Project Information
- What is Audacious?
- Why did you fork beep-media-player?
- So, why not work with XMMS2?
- What about BMPx?
- Will you support Winamp Modern skins?
- Obtaining Audacious
- Installation
- I can't compile HG!
- Can I install Audacious without X11?
- Why can't it play MP3 files?
- Why are there no titlebars?
- Why does Audacious have multiple instances?
- Why do I have ????? - ???????? (Invalid UTF-8) in my playlist?
- It won't let me set up automatic character encoding detection!
- Where does Audacious store it's settings?
- I use FVWM, E16 or a fairly early version of Sawfish as my window manager, and Audacious seems to be a little laggy!
- The player is coming up entirely blank!
- Can Audacious use Winamp .dll plugins?
- Why does Audacious have 5-6 running instances which each take up some of my memory?
- Audacious 1.3 can't find my skins!
- ./configure can't find libmowgli or libmcs, but I know for certain they are installed!
- Paranormal
- How do you use this thing?
- In evaluation scripts, what variables are available?
- I've got a cool preset, can you include it in Audacious?
- Audacious SDK
- When compiling audacious modules, ./configure keeps telling me it can't find the Audacious SDK!
- Third party modules/applications using the Audacious SDK fail to compile complaining about pthread_join (and friends)
- Common compilation issues
- Starting Audacious
- Headless operation
- Audacious Clients
- Why doesn't [insert XMMS control app here] work?
- How do I retrieve song metadata from the command line?
- What happened to the InfoPipe plugin?
- Is there a way to retrieve playback status from the command line?
- Playback
- Audacious doesn't output any sound and it seems to go about 3 -> N times as fast!
- Can I play DRM files from iTunes, Rhapsody, etcetera?
- Why doesn't timidity work like it should?
- Building
Project Information
What is Audacious?
Audacious is a fork of beep-media-player 0.9.7.1. This means that Audacious is not a fork of XMMS (it seems to be assumed that BMP classic == XMMS, that's not true either), but a continuation of a previous fork of XMMS.
Why did you fork beep-media-player?
First off, the fork has no political reasons, it is based entirely on the following issues:
- BMP classic had a number of deficiencies relating to Unicode.
- BMP classic is no longer actively maintained by the development team.
- We had our own ideas about how a player should be designed, which we wanted to try in a production environment.
- Beep lacked functionality that is useful for people who do streaming, such as the songchange plugin from XMMS.
Therefore, a fork seemed most logical as a choice for accomplishing our goals. The BMP team has done very good work, but their ideas for a next-generation beep do not align with ours.
So, why not work with XMMS2?
Working with XMMS2 does not seem like the best choice for us because we are not interested in developing a media client. We're looking to develop a media player based on our concepts of design, functionality and usability.
We may work with XMMS2 on codec support at some point in the future.
What about BMPx?
BMPx is a nice media player for what it is -- a jukebox. We're not too interested in having a jukebox, though.
Will you support Winamp Modern skins?
This is unlikely to occur.
Obtaining Audacious
Where can I obtain Audacious?
More than likely, your operating system provides packages for audacious. Details for a lot of systems are available on our Downloads page.
However, you may need to compile Audacious from source, in which case, you should also consult our Downloads page.
Which version should I get?
Typically speaking, we offer a stable version and a legacy version most of the time. Sometimes we offer a development version which is a snapshot of the latest code. Development versions are typically the versions which are odd-numbered (e.g. 1.1, 1.3).
If you really like the latest and greatest, you should get the development snapshots. This is only recommended for experienced users of Audacious, however.
You will most likely want the stable version.
Installation
I can't compile HG!
Please make sure that you have at least autoconf 2.59 installed.
Can I install Audacious without X11?
Yes, but you need X11 to build it.
Running Audacious
Why can't it play MP3 files?
If you've compiled Audacious from sourcecode you should install libmad-dev and recompile the plugins.
Why are there no titlebars?
Audacious overrides the window-manager in most cases. You can disable this behaviour in preferences.
Why does Audacious have multiple instances?
Some versions of Linux treat threads as seperate processes. Don't worry however, the memory usage reported is shared amongst those processes.
Why do I have ????? - ???????? (Invalid UTF-8) in my playlist?
You haven't set up chardet, or you do not have appropriate fallback encodings defined, or your locale is set incorrectly.
For what it's worth, Audacious will attempt to use the character detection feature first if you have it enabled, and it can generally figure out what encoding is valid for text in a specific region. Additionally, Audacious can make use of Mozilla's universal character set detection library if it is available.
If the character detection feature doesn't support your locale, you can always provide fallback encodings. You can seperate them with most common seperator values.
It won't let me set up automatic character encoding detection!
You need to compile audacious with --enable-chardet passed to configure.
Where does Audacious store it's settings?
Under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/audacious/ (by default XDG_CONFIG_HOME is ~/.config/), or in GConf or KDE settings (via libmcs).
I use FVWM, E16 or a fairly early version of Sawfish as my window manager, and Audacious seems to be a little laggy!
These window managers seem to dislike how GDK2 sets certain hints, resulting in racing between audacious and the window manager trying to assert which settings are correct.
You might try to use another window manager instead. If you cannot part with your WM, you might try enabling window manager decorations -- in which case those WMs should just ignore any requests we make.
According to the FVWM FAQ, it seems that the attitude from the FVWM development team towards applications which function in the way that we do (XMMS sets hints manually, we use GDK -- but it's the same thing basically) is negative, and from this we conclude that they probably have no interest in adding any workarounds to make the behaviour correct.
Additionally to make things more confusing, it seems that only some versions of FVWM do this, while others do not.
A possible workaround you could try for FVWM is putting the following in your .fvwm2rc:
DestroyFunc EWMHActivateWindowFunc
There is also a thread on the FVWM forum which provides some other workarounds you might try.
The player is coming up entirely blank!
You probably use XGL. You should consider AIGLX instead, it's a lot more friendly to audacious (e.g. works properly).
Can Audacious use Winamp .dll plugins?
The short answer is no.
However, other win32 plugins might work through the MPlayer hack that presently lives in audacious-plugins-ugly.
Why does Audacious have 5-6 running instances which each take up some of my memory?
Audacious is not using that memory for each instance, it shares the memory between the instances, so if you have 6 entries in your "ps aux" output which takes 5mb, Audacious is using 5 mb, and not 6x5mb.
These instances are not separate processes, but are threads, and your threading implementation is probably linuxthreads. Using NPTL threads will result in only one process being visible in "ps aux".
Audacious 1.3 can't find my skins!
You need to move your skins to .local/share/audacious/Skins. Audacious 1.3 uses the XDG basedir standard for storing configuration data and related data such as skins.
./configure can't find libmowgli or libmcs, but I know for certain they are installed!
You probably installed to /usr/local. This means that the pkg-config metadata for those libraries were also installed to /usr/local. The following code will provide a hint to pkg-config as where it can find the SDKs for those libraries:
$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/X11R6/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig"
Then you should be able to compile like normal. Please note that if you are using C Shell, you will need to use the setenv command instead of export.
Paranormal
How do you use this thing?
Click on Preferences, then click on Load and navigate to wherever you've placed a paranormal preset. You're likely to find them in /usr/share/audacious-plugins/paranormal/Presets/.
Alternatively, you can make your own paranormal preset. You must have a container selected to add an item, and you must cilck 'apply' to see any changes.
In evaluation scripts, what variables are available?
In transforms:
- d = the radius to use (x = cos(d) / y = sin(d))
- r = the range to use (distance)
- x = the position of x on a -1..1 square grid.
- y = the position of y on a -1..1 square grid.
In the scope:
- x = the position of x on a -1..1 square grid.
- y = the position of y on a -1..1 square grid.
- index = the current index of the PCM data (0..1)
- value = the current value of the PCM data (-1..1)
I've got a cool preset, can you include it in Audacious?
We can. You should open a topic on the forum.
Audacious SDK
When compiling audacious modules, ./configure keeps telling me it can't find the Audacious SDK!
You probably installed to /usr/local. This means that the pkg-config metadata for Audacious was also installed to /usr/local. The following code will provide a hint to pkg-config as where it can find Audacious' SDK:
$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/X11R6/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig"
Then you should be able to compile like normal. Please note that if you are using C Shell, you will need to use the setenv command instead of export.
Third party modules/applications using the Audacious SDK fail to compile complaining about pthread_join (and friends)
Congratulations, you've found a bug in your GLib installation. However, you can fix the compilation issue simply by adding "-pthread" to both your CFLAGS and LIBS environment variables:
$ export CFLAGS="-g -O2 -pthread"
$ export LIBS="-pthread"
Please note that if you are using C Shell, you will need to use the setenv command instead of export.
Also, if you do not like doing the above, and wish to make sure it gets fixed in GLib, the correct mantra to reiterate to the GLib developers is "you should implicitly declare -pthread in both GLIB_CFLAGS and GLIB_LIBS on systems where GThread makes use of them."
This doesn't seem to be an issue as of GLib 2.8 and later.
Common compilation issues
autogen.sh fails under FreeBSD/DragonFly, what do I do?!
FreeBSD ports likes to mangle the names of the autotools components. To get around this, you can override the default command choices used by autogen.sh:
$ export AUTOMAKE="automake19"
$ export LIBTOOLIZE="libtoolize15"
$ export AUTOCONF="autoconf259"
$ export AUTOHEADER="autoheader259"
$ export ACLOCAL="aclocal19 -I /usr/local/share/aclocal"
Then you should be able to run autogen.sh normally. Again note that if you are using C Shell, you should use setenv instead of export.
autogen.sh can't find autopoint!
Please install the gettext package, which provides autopoint.
Starting Audacious
It says that it can't find libaudacious.so (or something like that)
Odds are likely that your system is looking in the wrong place for the Audacious libraries. Previous versions of Audacious used a program called libtool which generated a launcher script for Audacious which worked around things like these. Additionally, it is probably likely that you compiled Audacious from source in this case and your system is not properly configured to check where Audacious has installed it's dependencies.
The solution here is to update your ld.so.conf. The following code (as root) will probably solve the problem.
# echo '/usr/local/lib' >> /etc/ld.so.conf
# ldconfig
If you are running on x86-64, you may need to specify /usr/local/lib64 instead of /usr/local/lib as your search path.
Headless operation
What is headless operation?
Headless operation is a mode in Audacious where the GUI is not started. It is mainly intended to be used for those who want to run Audacious with a minimal resource hit, and don't need the player GUI. A side effect of headless operation is that the X Server does not need to be running. However, you will need a client to work with Audacious in headless mode.
Shouldn't Audacious fork into background when used with --headless?
The simple answer is, no. Audacious does not fork into background when launched from a console without --headless. Therefore, the logical choice is to make that specific behaviour the same. The ability to daemonize Audacious is in the works, however, via the --daemonize option.
Audacious Clients
Why doesn't [insert XMMS control app here] work?
We have changed the socket address of Audacious to reflect protocol differences between XMMS and Audacious. Relinking your control applications against libaudacious (from source) will likely fix it. Good luck.
How do I retrieve song metadata from the command line?
You may use audtool to retrieve song metadata; it is part of audacious in current versions.
What happened to the InfoPipe plugin?
The XMMS & BMP InfoPipe plugins are too unstable to be included. Please do not report bugs with third-party versions of the plugins.
Additionally, InfoPipe has been deprecated by audtool anyway.
Is there a way to retrieve playback status from the command line?
Yes, via audtool.
# audtool --playback-status
playing
# audtool --playback-status
paused
# audtool --playback-status
stopped
Playback
Audacious doesn't output any sound and it seems to go about 3 -> N times as fast!
You are probably using the disk writer plugin, which is used as an emergency fallback if Audacious cannot guess what soundsystem it should use on first run. Go to Preferences, select Audio, and then select a different sound system from the dropdown list.
Can I play DRM files from iTunes, Rhapsody, etcetera?
Not with the plugins included with Audacious. However, you could burn them to CD in iTunes/Rhapsody/etc and then transcode them to a free format such as WavPack, or Ogg Vorbis.
Other solutions are being investigated by some segments of the user and development community, however.
Why doesn't timidity work like it should?
Simple answer: We don't know, and don't really care. timidity is slated for removal anyway, as amidi-plug has obsoleted it for the most part.
How do I manually request metadata from the files?
Select the playlist entries you want metadata to be displayed for and hit F5, or go to List -> Refresh List.
Building
I'm trying to compile Audacious from SVN, but I'm getting an error when I run configure. It says "configure: error: Cannot find libmcs".
You need to download and install libmcs.
It may be necessary to tell pkg-config where to find libmcs. Try doing:
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig"
Then you should be able to proceed with building audacious as normal.