WinAmp for Ubuntu 11.10

WinAmp is a very popular MP3 audio player, that was written by Nullsoft, for the Windows operating system. Nullsoft also wrote the equally popular ShoutCast server. ShoutCast is used for streaming MP3 on the internet. The name “Nullsoft” is a parody of “Microsoft”. WinAmp and ShoutCast was released as free software.

WinAmp is not available for open source operating systems. However, WinAmp has been forked off to open source projects – and one of the popular ones is the Audacious, which looks and sounds exactly like the good, old WinAmp. Audacious is a fork of Beep, that was a fork of XMMS, that was very popular in the open source environment. XMMS was a fork of WinAmp.

This is the procedure for installing the WinAmp look and sound on an Ubuntu 11.10 operating system.

Install Audacious from the Ubuntu Software Center for the Ubuntu 11.10 operating system.

The homepage of WinAmp has a free download page for skins, that has been neatly categorized. WinAmp uses its own file format for skins. These files has the WSZ extension. There are also skins with the WAL extension. These do not seem to work though. Every skins is contained in one single file and does not need to be opened or unpacked. Download one or more skins, that you will be using.

In the following example, the Pure Display skin will be installed. The Pure Display is a more neat and glossy skin.

sudo cp pure-display.wsz /usr/share/audacious/Skins/
sudo chmod 0777 /usr/share/audacious/Skins/*.wsz

Start Audacious.

Go to the View menu, go to Interface and switch the interface from GTK Interface to Winamp Classic Interface.

Press Ctrl+P to open Preferences, go to Skinned Interface and choose the Pure Display skin.

If you will be listening to MP3 ShoutCast internet radio and Firefox is not configured for Audacious, open your internet radio and let Firefox configure itself to use Audacious automatically. Digitally Imported is a good example of an internet radio, that streams MP3 ShoutCast audio.

If you will be listening to MP3 ShoutCast internet radio and Firefox is configured for Banshee, VLC Multimedia Player or something else than Audacious , you might want to configure Firefox to use Audacious automatically. Go to Preferences, go to Applications and configure “MP3 ShoutCast playlist” to use Audacious. You will need to browse to the following path. You can type to filter.

/usr/bin/audacious

If you will be listening to local MP3 files, you might want to configure the default Nautilus file manager. Right click one of your MP3 files and click Properties. Go to “Open With”. Choose Audacuous and “Set as default”.

Adjust the equalizer as necessary.

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