Ishmael’s Blog

I have a PC which dual boots Xubuntu and Windows XP. The Windows drive has music on it, while the other I use to run a local server and learn PHP. Xubuntu doesn’t come with a media player that can open .mp3 and .wma files, so I went in search of one.

I started with VLC, because I rely on that for playing most of my videos in Windows, but in Xubuntu, I was getting really poor quality audio quality. I have cheap speakers and the computer has old hardware, so I wasn’t looking for perfection. However, it was making scratching noises, and sounding distorted, so I moved on to a player that was geared more toward audio, and not video.

After reading some reviews and comparisons, I settled with Audacious (not to be confused with Audacity, which is a free Audio Editor). I wanted something lightweight (which is why I’m using Xubuntu after all), and this is exactly what I got. I wasn’t required to get any GNOME or KDE libraries, because it worked fine on XFCE. It reminds me of WinAmp, which I liked, but without the media management feature. My music is already sorted out by artist and album, so I don’t mind only having one playlist (although I can save and load them as I please).

So far, no complaints, except that the equalizer doesn’t come with built-in presets, like WinAmp did. It does let you load and save your own, including WinAmp ones, but I wasn’t able to find  a list of the WinAmp presets for download online. I haven’t tried messing with the skins, but I believe I can use XMMS and WinAmp “Classic”  skins.

I know this isn’t much of a review, but I just wanted a program that loaded fast and played my music, which this does, so I’m happy.