Available for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows platforms

Aug 9, 2016 15:20 GMT  ·  By

The popular Audacious music player is again in development, and it looks like the next major release will be version 3.8, for which a Beta milestone has been made available for public testing.

Audacious 3.8 promises to be a massive update to the free, cross-platform and open-source audio playback application used by numerous computers users around the globe, which will finally be able to run multiple instances of the software simultaneously.

"Each instance will remember its own configuration. To start a new instance, run audacious -N. The second instance can be controlled with audtool -2 < command >, the third with audtool -3 < command >, and so on," explain the developers in the release announcement.

New audtool commands, seamless cuesheet support

The first Beta release of Audacious 3.8 brings quite some goodies to those who are brave enough to install the pre-release version on their computers. For example, there are new audtool commands that let you enable or disable stream recording, as well as any plugins including but not limited to effects and visualizations.

Continuing with the new features, the cuesheet support has been made more seamless by implementing a more robust logic that prevents the addition of duplicates, correct display of artists that have only a single PERFORMER line, support for adding audio files normally if cuesheet support is now enabled, and support for libcue 2.0 or later.

Among other exciting new features coming to Audacious 3.8, we can mention read/write album artist support for OGG Vorbis and FLAC files, the ability to add folders from multiple URI protocols like MTP and FTP via GIO, a new option for displaying the time as MMM:SS instead of H:MM:SS, and support for the startup notification protocol from freedesktop.org.

Lastly, it will finally be possible to apply equalization and audio effects to a stream recording, and it looks like automatic selection will be supported for the best available output bit depth. Also, some of the existing features have been ported to the Qt interface in Audacious 3.8. Download the Beta for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now via our website.