XMMS
The X Multimedia System is a
free software audio player very similar to
Winamp, that runs on many
Unix-like operating systems.
Encyclopedia
The
X Multimedia System is a
free software audio player very similar to
Winamp, that runs on many
Unix-like operating systems.
History
XMMS was originally written as
X11Amp by Peter and Mikael Alm in November 1997, citing a 'lack of good mp3 players for linux'. The player was made to resemble
Winamp, which was first released in May that year. As such, XMMS has supported Winamp skins since its release. Though the original release was made under a license that did not provide any access to the program's
source code, it is now released under the
GNU General Public License.
On June 10, 1999, 4Front Technologies decided to sponsor X11Amp development and the project was renamed to
XMMS - the name being an acronym for
X MultiMedia System. Most XMMS users take this to mean "
X11 MultiMedia System" or "
X Window MultiMedia System"; the official interpretation of the 'X' is 'Cross-platform'.
Forks
XMMS has continued to use an antiquated version of the
GTK+ toolkit years after a major revision was available. The primary reason for this reluctance to upgrade was the fact that many XMMS plugins were dependent on the older version of GTK+ to function properly . Many software developers also consider the XMMS codebase to be poorly designed and difficult to maintain. These factors led to various
forks and related projects:
- The Beep Media Player, a fork of XMMS code that uses GTK+ 2, started around 2003
- A lesser known GTK+ 2 fork named XMMS2, by Mohammed Sameer. This project has since been discontinued.
- The XMMS2 project, a complete re-design of XMMS by one of its original authors - Peter Alm - started around the end of 2002.
Features
XMMS currently supports the following audio and video file formats:
- Audio CD, including CDDB via FreeDB lookup
- libmikmod supported formats See:
- MPEG Layer 1,2 and 3 , using the mpg123 library
- Vorbis
- WAV
- TTA support is provided by a third party plugin
- WavPack with support provided by a third party plugin
- speex high quality & ratio speech compression format via plugin
- FLAC support is provided by a plugin in the FLAC library
- AAC support is provided by the faad2 library, supporting m4a files
- WMA Limited support provided by third party plugin. See:
- APE Monkey's Audio Codec .ape files - support provided by the mac-port project plugin
- mp3PRO support is provided by a third party plugin
It supports
Icecast and
SHOUTcast streaming, and is compatible with
Winamp 2
skins.
References
- 4Front Technologies . regarding sponsorship of XMMS.
- SlashNET . Discussion with XMMS developers, .
- XMMS2 . Project .
See also
- Comparison of media players
External links
