Audacious began as a fork of Beep Media Player, which itself is a fork of XMMS. William "nenolod" Pitcock decided to fork Beep Media Player after the original development team announced that they were stopping development in order to create a next-generation version called BMPx. According to the Audacious home page, Pitcock and others "had own ideas about how a player should be designed, which wanted to try in a production environment." Since version 2.1, Audacious includes both the Winamp-like interface known from previous versions and a new, GTK-based interface known as GTKUI, which resembles foobar2000 to some extent. GTKUI became the default interface in Audacious 2.4.
Before version 3.0, Audacious used the GTK 2.x toolkit by default. Partial support for GTK3 was added in version 2.5, and Audacious 3.0 has full support for GTK3 and uses it by default. However, dissatisfied with the evolution of GTK3, the Audacious team chose to revert to GTK2 starting with the 3.6 release, with long-term plans of porting to Qt. Since August 08, 2018, the official website has HTTPS enabled site-wide and GTK3 support was dropped completely. As version 4.0, Audacious is using Qt as its primary toolkit but the GTK 2.x support is still available.
Audacious owes a large portion of its functionality to plug-ins, including all codecs. More features are available via third-party plug-ins. Current versions of the Audacious core classify plug-ins as follows :
Decoder plug-ins, which contain the actual codecs used for decoding content.
Transport plug-ins, which are lowlevel and implemented by the VFS layer.
General plug-ins, which provide user-added services to the player
Output plug-ins, which provide the audio system backend of the player.
Visualization plug-ins, which provide visualizations based on fast Fourier transforms of the wave data.
* FileWriter plug-in – no sound is played, the output is instead redirected into a new file: this plug-in supports the output file formats: WAV, mp3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, it can be used to transcode a file and also to rip a CD
Audacious has full support for Winamp 2 skins, and as of version 1.2, some free-form skinning is possible. Winamp.wsz skin files, a type of Zip archive, can be used directly, or can be unarchived to individual directories. The program can use Windows Bitmap graphics from the Winamp archive, although native skins for Linux are usually rendered in Portable Network Graphics format. Audacious 1.x allows the user to adjust the RGB color balance of any skin, effectively making a basic white skin equivalent to a host of colorized skins without editing them manually.
Clients
Audacious is intended to be a standalone media player not a server, though it accepts connections from client software, such as Conky. Connection to Audacious for remote control can be done over plain DBus, by using an MPRIS-compatible client, or using the official Audtool utility created just for this purpose.
