Audacious 3.6 released

February 28, 2015

We have released Audacious 3.6. You can download it here.

Major changes in this version

A completely new Qt-based user interface, which can be installed alongside the existing GTK+ and Winamp Classic interfaces. The new interface is usable today but not yet as feature-rich as the existing interfaces. In future, it will be the basis of a Mac OS X port of Audacious—stay tuned.
We have switched back to using GTK+ version 2.x by default. It has now been over three years since the release of GTK+ 3.0, and yet the “legacy” version of the toolkit provides more features relevant to Audacious, better cross-platform support, a more stable API, and lower memory usage. Audacious can still be built with GTK3 if desired, but we recommend the GTK2 variant for any desktop environment other than GNOME 3.
The source code has been converted from C99 to C++11. In addition to making the Qt port easier, the use of C++11 is already allowing more rapid development by letting the compiler work out many details that previously had to be written by hand. The plugin API has also been changed to C++. Contact us if you have a plugin for Audacious that you want help updating.

Requested features added (or brought back)

Double-size scaling of Winamp skins (#41)
Searching by genre in the search tool plugin (#158)
The playlist manager can be docked in the GTK+ interface (#160)
Crossfading on seek and manual song change (#213)
Support for “album artist” in song tags (#238)
Search results are filtered by number of songs in the search tool plugin (#396)
Cue files are automatically added to playlists and to the library (#430)
Song lengths read from ID3 tags are sanity-checked (#441)
Adjustable HTTP buffer size (#443)
Optional calculation of a more accurate song length estimate for MP3 files (#446)
Optional skipping of leading and trailing silence in MIDI files (#463)
Restored settings dialog for the SID plugin (#476)

Other new features and improvements

Audacious can now be built as a headless music player “daemon” with no GTK+ dependency. It this configuration, it can be controlled using either audtool or your favorite MPRIS 2 client. Note that some plugins still require GTK+.
By default, playback now resumes in a paused state upon startup, so that you can press play to continue from where you left off. If desired, there is still an option to resume immediately in an audibly playing state.
It is now possible to sort a playlist by genre.
A new “Open Containing Folder” command has been added to the GTK+ interface.
Window positions of visualization plugins and of the search tool are now saved and restored at startup when the Winamp Classic interface is used. A new menu option and keyboard shortcut (Y) have also been added to activate the search tool.
There is a new effect plugin to remove leading and trailing silence in any song file. Enabling this effect is recommended if you’re using crossfade.
New controls have been added to the song information dialog to allow tagging entire albums without retyping the artist and album name for each song.
A new option has been added to probe content of files with no recognized filename extension. With this option enabled, files with no extension can be added to playlists and to the library automatically, and subtunes in those files will also be recognized. The extra probing does slow Audacious down, so enable the option only if needed.
Support for the SID song lengths database has been restored. Songlengths.txt should be installed in the same location as the C64 ROMs (generally /usr/share/sidplayfp/ on Linux).
The ALSA output plugin now checks for new devices when the settings dialog is opened, so it’s no longer necessary to restart Audacious after plugging in a USB audio device.
The JACK and sndio output plugins have been rewritten from scratch in order to fix a number of problems.
Two new plugins have been added for native audio output and multimedia keyboard support on Mac OS X.
The generic and unhelpful “No decoder found” message has been replaced with somewhat more specific error reporting; for example, “No such file or directory.”

Bugs fixed since Audacious 3.5.2

MP4 decoding now uses FFmpeg instead of the deprecated libmp4ff (#425)
Menus appear on the correct monitor under Windows (#450)
Better tolerance for various character encoding errors (#481)
Fixed an issue parsing ID3 text fields containing null characters (#498)
Fixed a crash triggered by character encoding errors (#504)
The user interface no longer freezes while the last song in the playlist fades out.
A-to-B repeat correctly repeats from the end of the song if only point A is set.
Fixed extreme CPU usage when copying and pasting thousands of playlist entries.
MP3 files without Replay Gain tags are no longer amplified by 1 dB.

Bugs fixed since 3.6-beta1

Desktop notifications no longer show album art for the previous song (#507)
Fixed a crash when opening the ALSA settings window.
"About" and "Settings" for the audio CD plugin are no longer disabled.
Fixed an issue where album art could not be read from some ID3v2.3 tags.

Known issues

Some text is always displayed in English in the Qt interface (#466)
The playlist editor in the Qt interface currently has rather limited capabilities (#484)

Other notes

GCC 4.6 and earlier are no longer able to compile Audacious due to their lack of support for C++11.
It is not possible to switch between GTK+ and Qt while Audacious is running. If you build with --enable-qt and not --disable-gtk, then you must run audacious --qt to get the Qt interface.
The --verbose (or -V) command-line option can now be used once or twice, for different levels of detail.