The Audacious audio player has reached the 3.8 stable release recently. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 16.04 via PPA.

The 3.8 release features the ability to run multiple instances of Audacious. Instances are numbered and can be started with audacious -2, audacious -3, and so on; once running, they can be controlled with audtool -2 , audtool -3 , and so on. Each instance remembers its own configuration.

Audacious 3.8 also brings new audtool commands, improvements for Windows support and Cuesheet support, features port to Qt interface, and various bug fixes.

• support adding remote folders (ftp, mtp, etc.)
• drag & drop from search tool into playlists.
• Option to display MMM:SS instead of H:MM:SS
• Audio effects and equalization can optionally be applied to a stream recording
• Album artist support for FLAC and Vorbis files (read-write)
• Support for the freedesktop.org startup notification protocol

Audacious 3.8 multiple instances

Install Audacious 3.8 in Ubuntu:

While Audacious 3.8 is not available in any PPA at the moment, I’ve uploaded my personal build into PPA, available for Ubuntu 16.04 and Linux Mint:

1. To add the PPA, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps

Type in your password (no visual feedback) when it asks and hit Enter.

2. Then launch Software Updater, and do “partial upgrade” since the 3.8 release uses the new library versions.

Or just run command to install or upgrade Audacious player:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install audacious

3. (Optional) Uninstall Audacious 3.8 from the PPA and downgrade to the stock version in Ubuntu 16.04, run command:

sudo apt install ppa-purge && sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps

The 3.6.2 release of Audacious music player has been released recently with 4 important bug fixes.

Audacious is a free and open source audio player with a focus on low resource use, high audio quality, and support for a wide range of audio formats. It’s a fork of XMMS and the default audio player in Lubuntu and in Ubuntu Studio.

Audacious 3.6.2 was released at the end of May. It fixed:

• audacious won’t play back tagged True Audio (TTA) files
• crash when enable Dynamic Range Compresor plugin
• audacious skips to the next song when using audtool –playback-seek-relative -x and reaching the start of a song
• No sound with 36 kHz Ogg Vorbis file after equalizer is enabled.

How to install/upgrade Audacious in Ubuntu:

Webupd8 Team is maintaining a PPA with Audacious packages for Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Mint 17, and eOS Freye.

To add the PPA and install/upgrade the player, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) from the Dash or app launcher and then run below commands one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install audacious audacious-plugins

Note: There may be a few hours delay for the latest release to be made into PPA, check out the PPA page.

Audacious player, a descendant of XMMS, has reached the 3.6 release at the end of February, which brings the new Qt-based user interface.

This Qt 5 based UI can be installed alongside the existing GTK+ and Winamp Classic interfaces. But is not yet as feature-rich as the existing interfaces, it will be the basis of a Mac OS X port of Audacious.

Audacious 3.6 switches back to GTK2 by default. It can still be built with GTK3 if desired, but GTK2 is recommended for any desktop environment other than GNOME 3.

There are also some other (requested) features in the 3.6 release:

• The source code has been converted from C99 to C++11.
• Audacious can now be built as a headless music player “daemon” with no GTK+ dependency.
• playback now resumes in a paused state upon startup, so that you can press play to continue from where you left off. If desired
• It is now possible to sort a playlist by genre.
• A new “Open Containing Folder” command has been added to the GTK+ interface.
• new effect plugin to remove leading and trailing silence in any song file.
• New controls in the song information dialog
• Support for the SID song lengths database has been restored.
• Double-size scaling of Winamp skins
• Searching by genre in the search tool plugin
• Support for “album artist” in song tags
• Adjustable HTTP buffer size
• See the release note for more features as well as bug fixes

How to Install Audacious 3.6 in Ubuntu:

Webupd8 Team is maintaining a PPA with audacious packages for Ubuntu users, but the 3.6 release is not included at the moment (Check out the PPA page).

Once it’s available in the PPA, open terminal from the Dash/Menu or by hitting Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run below commands one by one to add PPA, update system cache, and install/upgrade Audacious:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install audacious audacious-plugins

Can’t wait? For Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Linux Mint 17.1, you can install my personal Qt build of Audacious 3.6 as well as plugins via below commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install audacious audacious-plugins

That’s it. Enjoy!

(Optional) If for some reasons you want to remove this audio player (installed from my personal ppa), run below commands in terminal:

sudo apt-get remove audacious audacious-plugins

sudo add-apt-repository -r ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/apps && sudo apt-get update