XMMS

XMMS's default appearance

The X Multimedia System (XMMS) is a free software audio player very similar to Winamp, that runs on many Unix-like operating systems.

Contents

1 History

1.1 Forks

2 Features
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

History

XMMS was originally written as X11Amp by Peter and Mikael Alm in November 1997, citing a 'lack of good mp3 players for linux'. [link] 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 [link] - 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'. [link]

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 (written by third parties) were dependent on the older version of GTK+ to function properly (about boxes and configuration dialogs). 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. [link]

Features

XMMS currently supports the following audio and video file formats:

Audio CD, including CDDB via FreeDB lookup
libmikmod supported formats (including .XM, .MOD, .IT) See:[MikMod Home]
MPEG Layer 1,2 and 3 (Also known as MP3), 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:[http://mcmcc.bat.ru/xmms-wma/]
APE Monkey's Audio Codec .ape files - support provided by the mac-port project plugin [link]
mp3PRO support is provided by a third party plugin [link]

It supports Icecast and SHOUTcast streaming, and is compatible with Winamp 2 skins.

References

4Front Technologies (August 20, 2005). [Press release] regarding sponsorship of XMMS.
SlashNET (August 20, 2005). Discussion with XMMS developers, [1999-06-13].
XMMS2 (August 20, 2005). Project [history].

External links