After more than a month of beta testing, Audacious music player version 4.5 was finally released today!

The new release of this lightweight free open-source player features new plugin, new lyrics provider, and various other improvements. See what’s new & how to install for Ubuntu users.

First, Audacious 4.5 introduced new Playback History plugin for the Qt UI. The plugin can track and store the history entries in history, and delete automatically on app exist.

The plugin is disabled by default. With it enabled, you’ll see the right-sidebar (as the feature image shows you) providing history playback entries either in Song or Album mode.

While, user has the choices to double-click an entry to play a song, use Del to delete selected entry or entries, or restart plugin/player to clear them all.

For the Lyrics plugin, the release added support fetching lyrics from lrclib.net. It’s a free open-source service that provides synchronized lyrics, primarily in the LRC format.

Audacious 4.5 also extended the VU Meter plugin support to display signal level in the GTK UI. And, it improved the “Jump to Song” dialog, which now uses mnemonic for filter entry, DPI aware window size, enables uniform row heights for better performance, and remembers checkbox setting.

Compare to the last Beta, the stable release add ability to drag’n’drop re-arrange entries in Queue Manager, through it only works for the QT user interface.

Other changes include:

• Support middle click tray icon to pause or play next.
• Add support ReplayGain tags in Opus files.
• Support Album Artist tag in APE header.
• Remove .m4v support as it won’t play in Audacious.
• Remove Moonstone plugin as it unmaintained.
• Add SDL3 support for SDL output plugin, drop SDL1 support.
• New Glare, Winamp 2.9 skins.
• Various fixes and other changes.

How to Install Audacious 4.5 in Ubuntu

The official release note as well as the source tarball are available at Audacious website via the link below:

Besides the source tarball, there are also official Windows .exe and other installers available at its download page.

For Ubuntu, I’m been maintaining an unofficial PPA for few years, which so far contains the music player packages for Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04 and 25.04.

To add PPA & install Audacious, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) run commands below one by one:

• First, add the PPA by running command:

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps

  Tips: as the PPA also contains many other app packages, you may use this one instead.
  

• Ubuntu now automatically refresh package cache while adding PPA, but some flavors (e.g., Linux Mint) may not. In the case, run command below to manually refresh cache:

  sudo apt update

• Finally, either run the command below to install or update audacious package:

  sudo apt install audacious audacious-plugins

  
  Or use “Software Updater” tool to check updates.

For most Linux, there’s also an unofficial Audacious Flatpak package, which runs in sandbox environment.

Linux Mint and Fedora may search & install the package from either Software Manager or GNOME Software. While, Debian/Ubuntu may run the 2 commands below one by one to install.

• First, install the flatpak daemon package:

  sudo apt install flatpak

• Then, install Audacious as Flatpak via command:

  flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.atheme.audacious.flatpakref

After installation, log out and back in if the app icon is not visible. Or run the command below to start from terminal:

flatpak run org.atheme.audacious

And, for the Flatpak package updates, use the command below to check & install:

flatpak update org.atheme.audacious

Uninstall Audacious

To uninstall Audacious player installed from PPA, run command in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):

sudo apt remove --autoremove audacious audacious-plugins

And, remove PPA either by using “Software & Updates” utility under “Other Software” tab, or run command:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps

For the Flatpak package, uninstall it by running command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data org.atheme.audacious

Also run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove useless run-times.