Winamp is a media player for Windows XP/Vista/7.. and now it’s also available for Google Android. Winamp is one of the most popular and powerful media player among windows users. Winamp is specifically known for it’s playlist, skins, and a bundle of advanced features that allow you to customize it effectively. Winamp is a freeware application i.e basic version is available free but you need to pay for it’s pro-version.

Are you looking for Winamp on Ubuntu? In fact, Winamp is available only for Windows (and Android). That’s not exactly true because Winamp vs 3 (The latest stable version is Winamp 5.621, released few days ago) Alpha version was also released for Linux based OS (probably the RPM packages, for Linux distributions like Fedora) but it’s not available anymore for Ubuntu or any other Linux distros. So in this post you may notice some free and open source media players equivalent to Winamp not only in features but also in look and feel (by using Winamp skins).

A Media Player Equivalent to Winamp : Audacious

audacious-player with Winamp skin

Audacious is a free and open source (Released under GPL) media player (more precisely an audio player) and provides high quality audio output. The other main advantages is that it consumes very less computational resources and supports a variety of formats. Audicious started a fork (Forking in software development means starting an independent development on a project after getting the source code legally from the original developer) project the BMP (Beep Media Player, which also started as a fork project of XMMS)

audacious-with-winamp-skin

Features of Audacious at a Glance

  • it’s very simple and efficeint
  • playlists, visualization, skins (a lot of Winamp skins are available to try) ..plus a lot of other advanced features
  • it supports a lot of input formats such as MP3, Vorbis, AAC, WMA, Flac, Wavpack, ALAC (Apple Lossless) etc.
  • A lot of plugins are available to extend the features, in a couple of click

How to install audacious in Ubuntu 11.04/10.10/11.10

Audacious is available in the packages so it’s very simple to install. Open Ubuntu Software Center, search for ‘audacious’ and install the required package (You may need to enter ubuntu login password for authentication) or simply open terminal (CTRL+ALT+T) and type :

sudo apt-get install audacious

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7 Comments

  1. With much more awesome music apps like Amarok and Clementibe does anyone even need Winamp anymore, which isn’t even free and open source software

  2. I’ve just put ubuntu default media player, whatever it is that they offer. because very rarely did I play a song. prefer to listen to songs from the radio.

  3. Thanks for this post. As much as some people on here don’t realize it, winamp is one of the harder apps in windows to replace. It hands down blows away any other music app, including Amarok. However I am liking Audacious, it is definitely on the right path. I don’t understand why they changed xmms so much. The old version used to be my preferred linux music player, but now its pretty useless. 

  4. Neat. Simple interface and sleek look. I know there’re a lot of other players for Linux Desktop to choose from. But this one is actually quite nice. And it has an equalizer! +1

  5. You start saying ” That’s not exactly true because Winamp vs 3 (The latest stable version is Winamp 5.621, released few days ago) Alpha version was also released for Linux based OS ”
    This is a lie! Winamp never did a version for ubuntu, specialy to be in the repos, i maintain ubuntu repos and never seen winamp there! and your topic name is wrong, this is winamp clone for ubuntu! As you dont seem to put winamp run on ubuntu.

    Cheers

  6. Works great with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS – except for one thing – it require a extension to save the list of mp3 name… witch is odd on Linux AT LEAST. Also the view should NOT use bold font for the list by default and by default the WinAMP view, skin Refugee should be selected.
    As for the list, I find out that the file *MUST* end with .pls extension.
    Kinda weird, since I was under the idea (from Amiga OS) that the files not need to have the excension and that extensions are bad and DOS-like 🙂 Nevermind 🙂 It works great and that is all I want 🙂

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