The first beta of Audacious 4.5, the next major update to this longstanding open-source media player, is available for testing — and based on the changelog there’s plenty worth testing!
For those unfamiliar with it, Audacious is a lightweight, opens-source and cross-platform audio player written in C++. It was first released in 2005 as a fork of Beep Media Player, itself a fork of the legendary WinAMP-inspired Linux audio app XMMS.
Though Audacious is descended from audio players that were considered a bit flashy in their heyday, its fair to say its among the more ‘modest’ look media players in the modern era (it can be jazzed up with skins).
Aesthetic choices aside, Audacious‘ primary aim is delivering a fuss-free, resource-efficient music playback, support for an expansive set of plugins, robust media codec handling, and native GTK and Qt GUIs.
Does the latest beta better any of that? You betcha!
Audacious 4.5: What’s New?
New plugins and features in Audacious 4.5 include several changes to bring the player’s Qt and GTK guises into step, with the VU Meter plugin now available in GTK builds, while there’s now feature parity in the ‘Jump to Song’ dialog in Qt and GTK builds.
However, Audacious 4.5 Qt builds have something GTK builds don’t (yet) have: a new Playback History plugin! While a proof of concept ‘port’ for GTK has been proposed on the Audacious issue tracker it’s yet to be accepted or merged in this beta.
Elsewhere, new Glare and Winamp 2.9 skins are included in the audacious-plugins package, making it easier for those who want to restyle the player in more dramatic fashion to do so without trawling the web for compatible themes:
Other notable improvements in Audacious 4.5:
- Middle-click action settings for Status Bar plugin
- Dark mode preference now picked up in Flatpak builds
- New lyrics source: lrclib.net
- Album Artist tags support in APE headers
- Better probing of small audio files
- Outdated ReplayGain tag support in Opus files
- Experimental (and unmaintained) Moonstone plugin removed
- Create a new playlist when importing one
- Declare support for AAC files in FFmpeg plugin
- MPRIS plugin gains an info dialog
- Support SDL3 for SDL output plugin, drop SDL1 support
- Change icons in preferences window
Additionally, Audacious 4.5 beta is said to ‘prefer the PipeWire plugin over PulseAudio’, where applicable. A number of improvements have been made to the PipeWire plugin too, including:
- Use RingBuf from audcore
- Respect the output_buffer_size setting
- Improve get_delay() and drain() functions
- Support for 5 and 7 channels
Bugs fixed since the last 4.4.x build include:
- Large memory leak in Jump to Song dialog (Qt)
- Blur Scope plugin (GTK) now works on Wayland
- Prefer OpenMPT plugin for S3M files
- .m4v removed from supported file types
- Dual play icon in default skin fixed
In all, an admirable array of improvements to this long-standing audio app. If you want to go hands on with these changes you can download source code from the Audacious GitHub to build it by hand.
Would you prefer trying a stable release?
Audacious 4.4.x release won’t offer the changes listed above, but you can download it for Windows, macOS, and Linux from the official project website, or make use the unofficial Audacious Flathub or Audacious snap builds.
Those using Ubuntu 25.04 can pop open the Terminal and run a quick sudo apt install audacious audacious-plugins command to install Audacious 4.4.2 without involving any extraneous software sources.
Are you an avowed fan of Audacious? Let me know your thoughts on it, and the latest crop of changes in the works, by leaving a comment below.