Some musing on XMMS + Audacious + lulz

Recently, we’ve been getting a lot of the following on our IRC channel:

<intangir> well xmms could do it

<intangir> and now xmms is no longer being updated

<intangir> its just been taking out of new debian and ubuntu repos ;(

<intangir> so audacious is the only thing that is close

<intangir> it must fill the void!

This is incorrect for a number of reasons, I am sorry if your distribution or the internet has made you believe that we are some magical successor to XMMS. This is not the case. Furthermore, calling us a “disgrace to open source” because we have no interest in being like XMMS (even the winamp2 skins are due to be leaving at some point), does not make us want to help you.

Now, why do people think Audacious is not acceptable replacement to XMMS? Well, not all people do, it’s more of the 5% of people who have specific use cases not covered in Audacious. Clearly if Audacious was not suitable, a lot of people would be blogging about it. Instead, we only see a few people blogging about it.

However, that said, I think Audacious’s focus is probably not the right focus for an “XMMS replacement” solution, and I have a plan for that (although once I finish writing it, someone else will likely be maintaining it, as I don’t really care enough). More on that later.