Every linux distribution has its own default music player that is bundled in the offering, but no matter which distro I install, I keep coming back to one player which I absolutely like for its simplicity. Thats Audacious for you. It is simply a no nonsense music player that will play a file, a playlist or even a folder for you. I am not a huge fan of an application which manages my music for me. I go all old school and still manage my music files as folders in my ~/Music. So all the fancy music management that comes with the likes of Bansee, Rhythmbox et al hardly strikes a chord with me. And so the simple offerings which Audacious brings with it work great for me.
Another thing that keeps bringing me back to this player is its classic winamp interface. That thing is pure nostalgia. I remember the old days when winamp used to be one of my must have softwares and I would spend loads of time trying to customize it with different skins and make it more funky. Audacious comes with some basic skins but I wanted to install some more for old times sake. And so I started finding winamp skins online which would be compatible with Audacious. Seems the unarchived format .wsz is a perfect match and works flawlessly with Audacious.
Some more googling landed me on this page which is hosting quite a number of winamp skins which I could download and install. I tried one and then another and then heck I wanted them all. So I put some scripting skills to use and build a list of wsz skins from the webpage source and ran it through the following script which downloaded them one after the other for me.
#! /bin/sh
count=1
total=`wc -l wszlist | cut -d ' ' -f 1`
while [ $count -le $total ]
do
wszfile=`head -$count wszlist | tail -1`
wszfilelink="http://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/files/skins/winamp-skins/"$wszfile
wget $wszfilelink
mv $wszfile skins/
count=`expr $count + 1`
done
All these skins just need to copied to ~/.local/share/audacious/Skins and they are ready to be selected from the settings dialog. Sharing some screenshots for the options that were now available to me when I play my music.
One thing which bothered me still was that the player did not have any EQ presets but the solution for this wasn’t hard to find either. Post on this forum gives precise information to add the required preset details to an eq.preset file placed in ~/.config/audacious. This file enables use of all the familiar winamp presets into Audacious.
With these simple hacks I can now enjoy my music the old school way. The nostalgia factor is just too high to even consider using any other music player to enjoy my music.
Leisure Linux 