There’s one word that has become part of my daily Ubuntu life. That’s “Audacious”. While my main point is to waste my life away at the computer to find new things to play with and post about, I play music. My desktop literally plays it’s 2000+ music files all day, every day whenever it is running. If it’s in Vista, Media Player 64-bit is running through the list and playing files for my listening pleasure (however, that’s rare).. This only began after the AOL buyout of Winamp.com and the subsidiaries that made Winamp possible. After that buy, winamp began to be… intensive and heavy for system resources. Also, the lack of a 64 bit version made me gasp as the 64-bit players handle so much better against intense processor usage, like when taring (zipping) an iso file to MAX compression. 32-bit apps almost always skip and choke no matter how fast of a processor.
So, I was stuck with the standard Rythmebox of Ubuntu 9.04 and didn’t know what to do. I can’t say I hated it, but I couldn’t say I “liked” it at all. I searched and found a couple of different players, nothing that “induced” that love I had for messing with playlists and playing music all day. Nothing fulfilled my needs like bmp did back in the Gutsy Gibbon era(7.10). BMP was as close to winamp in an original sense as it got.
Enter Audacious. While it’s not “perfect” as a replica of Winamp from the version 2.5 era, it’s close. It’s almost identical to the original Winamp 2 series and even can use those OLD skins you had, plus new ones from today!
It handles really well and works with all of my codecs! I’m glad to have it at my side. It’s very lightweight and plays without problems on my desktop with two large ISO’s being extracted from tar.gz’s! Wonderful! Perfect, and it fits way to well. I will recommend this to anyone who remembers how well Winamp 2.51 performed on those old Windows 98 machines while playing games like Diablo 2 with not enough ram to even think about multi-tasking. It really brings back these memories and was easy to install with Ubuntu. If you have any issues with your music player like I did, search up for Audacious.
For the Ubuntu line of OS’s you can simply use an apt-get install audacious command in your terminal! Best part of all. You can run audacious at the command line too!
