Audacious is a media player based on BMP and XMMS. Audacious is a fork of beep-media-player 0.9.7.1.
Why did you fork beep-media-player?
First off, the fork has no political reasons, it is based entirely on technical merit. It's based on a few issues:
ˇ There have been some quirks in beep-media-player that have annoyed users. (ID3v2 tag handling can be buggy for some users.)
ˇ BMP classic is no longer actively maintained by the development team.
ˇ We had our own ideas about how a player should be designed, which we wanted to try in a production environment.
ˇ 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. descender &c have 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. However, interest has been expressed for offering a "frontend mode" where the Audacious GUI acts as a frontend for XMMS2. This concept seems absolutely interesting, and will be investigated at a later date.
We're also fairly interested in a codesharing relationship with XMMS2 regarding codec support.
What about BMPx?
BMPx has a number of good concepts. We're very interested in sharing common code with them, including the new BMPx media library. That looks stunning in and of itself.
Will you support Winamp Modern skins?
Possibly in the future. We wish to make the player GUI an optional module, and even support operating Audacious as a media server, somewhat like XMMS2 -- for people who go that route.
Controlling BMP:
When you start up BMP, you will get a console very similar to that of WinAmp.
- On the top is the window title bar. To the right you will see 3 buttons,
Left button will minimize BMP.
Middle button will make BMP only display the title bar.
Right button will end the BMP session.
- The area in the upper left part displays the following:
- Play state: Paused, Stopped, or Playing
- Time elapsed in the current song or if you click on it, the reversed.
- Spectrum analyzer of the sound being played. Right mouse click will bring up the Visualization menu. Left mouse button will change the analyzer to an oscilloscope and/or none.
- To the right of the Spectrum analyzer is the title of the file being played.
This also contains the length of the song being played, as well as its position in the [unsorted] playlist. Right clicking in this window will bring up a new menu with some more options that are self explaining.
- In the left part of the Spectrum analyzer you'll have letters (at least if you use the default skin) O A I D V. This is known as the "clutterbar'. Left-clicking on these will open up menus or perform the listed actions.
O : Options menu
A : Always on top
I : File info box
D : Double size mode
V : Visualization menu
- Underneath the track title are the following static informational data:
- bit rate in KBps (usually 128 or 112)
- Sample Rate in KHz (usually 44)
- Stereo or Mono channel mixing
- Underneath the informational data are a few controls you can play with:
- The first slider controls the volume
- The second slider controls the balance between speakers
- The button marked "EQ" loads up the graphic equalizer
- The button marked "PL" loads up the playlist editor
- The LARGE slide bar moves from left to right as the song plays. You can
drag this to jump to another location in the current file.
- On the bottom of the console are the standard buttons you would see on a CD player: Previous track, Play, Pause, Stop, Next track, eject, shuffle and repeat.
- The eject button doesn't REALLY eject, of course. It opens up the file requester. The File Requester builds a playlist for the current BMP session. You can use it to load files, add files to the list, or load all mp3s in a directory.
- The shuffle button randomizes the sequence of the playlist.
- The repeat button when enabled makes the playlist loop when it reaches the end of the playlist.
Requirements:
ˇ AutoTools (i.e. automake, autoconf)
ˇ GTK+ >= 2.8
ˇ libglade >= 2.4
Optional Dependencies:
ˇ Visualization support: libvisual >= 0.2, SDL >= 1.2.9
ˇ Vorbis playback: libvorbis >= 1.0, libogg >= 1.0, libvorbis >= 1.0
ˇ FLAC playback: libogg >= 1.0, libFLAC >= 1.1.2
ˇ ALSA Audio output: alsa-lib
ˇ esd(1) Audio output: libesd >= 0.2
Installation:
cd bmp-0.9.7
./configure
make
make install
This will put the binary in /usr/local/bin and plugins in /usr/local/lib/bmp/
Note for packagers: The gnome-vfs option is VERY EXPERIMENTAL. We suggest you do not use it in your official distribution packages
