Aqualung 0.9 Beta 6 review
DownloadAqualung is a music player for the GNU/Linux operating system
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Aqualung is a music player for the GNU/Linux operating system. Aqualung plays audio files from your filesystem and has the feature of inserting no gaps between adjacent tracks.
Here's how the test looks like. Pick a song that you know really well, something that's in your bones like Siberian Khatru. Grab it from CD using cdparanoia to have it as a WAV file. Now open your favourite wave editor and slice the file up into multiple consecutive sections. Be careful not to insert silence, delete samples or alter any sample data. Save the slices to separate files. Now convert the sample rate of some pieces to random values (the example program shipped with the libsamplerate library will let you do this in very good quality). Pick some pieces and convert them to Ogg Vorbis format. Pick some others and encode them to FLAC. Pick a few and convert them to mono. Now open up the playlist editor of the music player in question and add the files in order. Push play, and listen.
You are probably nodding your head, but today's popular music player software: Winamp (on that other OS), XMMS, FreeAmp, Zinf and AlsaPlayer all fail this test. These programs are completely unusable to the serious listener because they fail to provide one humble feature: the ability to play back a list of consecutive audio files without terrible gaps in between tracks. (Although XMMS does have a plugin called xmms-crossfade which mitigates this problem.)
That's right. But fortunately enough, Aqualung is here to fix all the mess. It is a music player designed from the ground up to provide continuous, absolutely transparent, gap-free playback across a variety of input formats and a wide range of sample rates thereby allowing for enjoying quality music: concert recordings and "non-best-of" albums containing gapless transitions between some tracks. (Multiple movements long compositions are often broken into separate but gaplessly flowing tracks when mastered to CD). Obvious examples are The Song Remains The Same (Led Zeppelin), The Dark Side Of The Moon (Pink Floyd), and Yessongs (Yes). Besides the ability to play the music from these records without a defect, Aqualung provides high quality sample rate conversion, a feature that is essential when building large digital music archives containing input sources conforming to various standards. Aqualung passed our test – and it will pass yours, too.
Here are some key features of "Aqualung":
Almost all sample-based, uncompressed formats (eg. WAV, AIFF, AU etc.) are supported. For the full list of these formats, visit the libsndfile homepage.
Files encoded with FLAC (the Free Lossless Audio Codec) are supported.
Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Speex audio files are supported.
MPEG Audio files are supported. This includes MPEG 1-2-2.5, Layer I-II-III encoded audio, including the infamous MPEG-1 Layer III format also known as MP3. libMAD (which Aqualung uses) provides noticeably higher quality output than mpg123 (which XMMS relies upon).
MOD audio files (MOD, S3M, XM, IT, etc.) are supported via the libmodplug library. This provides higher quality than MikMod (used by XMMS as the default MOD decoder) and much higher quality than Winamp.
Musepack (a.k.a. MPEG Plus) files are supported.
Files encoded with Monkey's Audio Codec are supported.
Naturally, any of these files can be mono or stereo.
What's New in This Release:
This release introduces a fair number of substantial improvements:
Music Store builder: automatically build a Music Store by scanning the files on disk. Perform CDDB lookups & extract metadata on the fly.
MPEG decoder enhancements: robust file recognition, VBR and UBR file support, frame-accurate seeking, true gapless playback via eliminating encoder padding+delay read from LAME headers.
Fully revamped metadata support using TagLib. The result is a more complete implementation also supporting APE tags in Musepack files.
Automatic output driver detection: ability to startup without command line arguments (using default driver parameters).
Systray (a.k.a. Notification Area) support.
Handling of compressed MOD files (.gz and .bz2).
Resolved issue with JACK memory locking (which previously resulted in runaway memory consumption).
Aqualung compiles & runs under FreeBSD and Cygwin.
NEW LIBRARY DEPENDENCIES:
TagLib >= 1.4 is now required for metadata support. http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html
GTK+ >= 2.10 is needed for the (optional) Systray support.
DROPPED DEPENDENCIES:
libid3tag library is not required anymore (succeeded by TagLib).
Aqualung 0.9 Beta 6 keywords