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Audacious is an open source audio player. A descendant of XMMS, Audacious plays your music how you want it, without stealing away your computer’s resources from other tasks. Drag and drop folders and individual song files, search for artists and albums in your entire music library, or create and edit your own custom playlists. Listen to CD’s or stream music from the Internet. Tweak the sound with the graphical equalizer or experiment with LADSPA effects. Enjoy the modern GTK-themed interface or change things up with Winamp classic skins. Use the plugins included with Audacious to fetch lyrics for your music, to set an alarm in the morning, and more. Basic audio player controls include pause and stop, volume adjustment, repeat and shuffle modes. You can navigate back and forth within the stream by moving a slider, view and edit metadata, queue and unqueue songs, play audio CDs, jump to a particular song or position in a song, as well as remove duplicates and unavailable files from the list. You can choose between a Winamp-like and GTK+-based interface. This first one provides a small-sized version of Winamp with similar playback controls, equalizer and playlist manager. You may choose between several preset Winamp skins or install custom ones (WSZ file format).

The GTK+ interface sports an intuitive design that comes with support for multiple tabs. This way, you can open different playlists in multiple tabs, switch between them, and delete them. It is able to remember all opened tabs in case you exit the app. Playlists can be imported and exported, and you may sort the songs included in a selected list by track number, title, artist, album, genre, or other criteria.

The playback controls are straightforward and enable you to play, pause or stop the current audio selection, seek for a position in the audio streams, jump to next or previous song, repeat or shuffle songs, queue items, and tweak the volume. Audacious is intuitive so getting used to its audio playback features doesn’t take much of your time. Although it is not as rich-featured as other players like MediaMonkey, it is all worthy of your attention because it focuses precisely on the audio playback process and not on the extra options that you may never use.