Audacious

Audacious is an open-source audio player well-known on Linux that allows you to listen to audio files, create playlists, and edit metadata. It comes with support for gapless playback, plugins and Winamp-like themes.

It is portable so it can be copied on USB flash drives or other devices and run on the target system without having to go through an installation process.

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.

You can drag and drop the content of a folder directly in the main panel, stream music from custom URLs and play audio CDs. The utility offers support for a wide range of audio formats, such as MP3, AAC, FLAC, SHN, WMA, WAV, and MIDI.

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.

The program’s functionality can be improved with the aid of plugins. Audacious comes packed with several preset plugins and you can install other ones as well.

Plugins help you perform various tasks, such as set up alarms, send tracks to your Last.fm account, retrieve lyrics from the Internet, and apply several effects, like Echo, Silence Removal, Speed and Pitch, Voice Removal, and Channel Mixer.

All things considered, 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.