Audacious Media Player Waste of Time

With XMMS going by the wayside as in no more development I decided to see what was available as a replacement in my Gutsy system.
A quick Google search presents me with a media player going by the name Audacious. That name couldn't be a better fit. And I need to point out that you should not confuse this program with Audacity which is a very good audio editor in it's own right.

I open up the Synaptic Package Manager and do a search for Audacious. Mark the main package and try to mark the plug-ins but it's not going to happen. When I marked the main package for installation it popped up an error that said it can't be installed because the plug-ins aren't going to be installed. HUH!!!

I'm trying to mark the plug-ins but the main package error prevents me from adding them on.
So I try marking the plug-ins first. Same problem. I get an error message that the main program isn't going to be installed so the plug-ins can't be installed.
This is NUTS!!!

Alright then. I'll go to their website and see what's going on. I click on the link for their site from a Google search and am presented with a page that says "It Works!"
That's nice. Maybe that page works but the software package sure doesn't. I'm getting this bad feeling. Packages are messed up and the website is down.

Okay! I'll go and grab the .deb packages. Download them and when I try to install them I get the same errors as I did in Synaptic.
GRR....!!!!!!

Okay! Sigh! I'll grab the source code and compile it from there. So I grab the base and plug-in source code and get to work.
Dependency errors! Drat! Or should I say error because it said I was missing one file.
Go and grab the source for that file, compile and install it.
Back to the main package. Another dependency error. After about 5 of these I finally get the main package installed.

Next I install the 3 plug-in packages and thankfully they go much easier.
Now I open up Audacious and it looks suspiciously similar to XMMS even though the developers have said in many articles that they are trying to design a media player that is not a continuation of XMMS and will stand on it's own merit.

I open the file browser and tell Audacious to open an Mp3 file.
ERROR! Either the file permissions are not set properly or you don't have the proper codec installed.
I check to see what plug-ins I have installed. There is a whole list of them but no where do I see one for playing Mp3's. I check on a few forums and apparently that plug-in should be either in the base or dev plug-in package.

So I reinstall the plug-in packages. Still no luck. I go online to see if I can find any other info. Plenty of people posting about problems opening Mp3 files but no real solutions other then to make sure the plug-in packages were installed.

That's when I made my decision. Sudo apt-get remove audacious and all the plug-ins.
I knew this package was a bad omen when I had problems installing through Synaptic and found a dead website.

I'll stick with VLC. It has some quirks but the additional features like audio ripping and video conversion more then make up for those few minor annoyances.
And I have to really wonder what direction Audacious will really take.
Broken .deb packages and websites that are down do not paint a rosey picture for it's future.
I know it left a very bad taste in my mouth and it will take the Audacious developers a lot of work and plenty of add on features for me to even take a look at it again.

In retrospect I did get a good refresher course on compiling and installing from a source package and I honed my skills on finding missing dependency packages.
But the time wasted on a software product of shoddy construction was time I could have used on better things.

TaZMAn

Compile and Install from Source Code

So you found some neat software that isn't in the repositories or doesn't have a .deb package. (See my post on Security about .deb packages.)

The only option is to download the tar file and compile it and install it.
Although this sounds scary it's really not that hard to do.

Here is a step by step how to.

The simplest place to download the tar.gz file is on your desktop.
Let's say the file name is xyz.tar.gz

Note: The extension for the tar file can be one of the following;
.gz .tgz .bz .b2z


Now create a directory in your home folder where you will uncompress the files. (Mine is named “source”)

Open up your terminal and type this in;

cd Desktop

This will navigate you to your desktop where the tar file is located.

Uncompress your tarballs into the folder using the -c option as follows (and replacing “source” with the name of your directory):

If the file was compressed with gzip it will have the tar.gz or the .tgz extension and you need to use the following code.

If the file has the .tgz extension use this;

tar zxvf xyz.tgz -C ~/source

If the file has the .gz extension use this;

tar zxvf xyz.tar.gz -C ~/source

If the file was compressed with bzip it will have the .bz or the .b2z extension and you should use these commands;

For the .bz extension use this;

tar jxvf xyz.bz -C ~/source

For the .b2z extension use this;

tar jxvf xyz.tar.b2z -C ~/source

If you don’t know the compression method that has been used you can use the file command:

file nameoffile

Now type this into the terminal to change back to your home folder;

cd

Now change directories to your uncompressed files by typing this into the terminal;

cd source/xyz


It is also recommended you go to the directory in Nautilus and look for a “README” or “INSTALL” file, because the software might require you to do things in a specific manner. Normally you would compile the source code like this:

./configure

This will run a script to see whether or not all the dependencies are correct and your build environment are right. If you are missing dependencies the script should tell you the ones you are missing and what it needs.

When the configure script is finished (has completed correctly), run this:

make

Make will do the initial compiling of your software. To finish it of and install your software run:

sudo make install

If the compilation doesn’t succeed check the errors and run:

make clean

before you restart. To remove the software if you don’t need/ want/ like it simply run:

sudo make uninstall


You have now learned how to unpack, compile and install / uninstall a program from source code.
See! It was easy!

TaZMAn