![]() | Welcome to Aqualung, |
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Aqualung is a music player for the GNU/Linux operating system. It plays audio files from your filesystem and has the feature of inserting no gaps between adjacent tracks.
Here's how the test looks like. Pick a song that you know
really well, something that's in your bones like Siberian
Khatru. Grab it from CD using cdparanoia
to have it
as a WAV file. Now open your favourite wave editor and slice the file
up into multiple consecutive sections. Be careful not to insert
silence, delete samples or alter any sample data. Save the slices to
separate files. Now convert the sample rate of some pieces to random
values (the example program shipped with the libsamplerate library will
let you do this in very good quality). Pick some pieces and convert
them to Ogg Vorbis
format. Pick some others and encode them to FLAC. Pick a few and convert
them to mono. Now open up the playlist editor of the music player in
question and add the files in order. Push play, and listen.
You are probably nodding your head, but today's popular music player software: Winamp (on that other OS), XMMS, FreeAmp, Zinf and AlsaPlayer all fail this test. These programs are completely unusable to the serious listener because they fail to provide one humble feature: the ability to play back a list of consecutive audio files without terrible gaps in between tracks. (Although XMMS does have a plugin called xmms-crossfade which mitigates this problem.)
That's right. But fortunately enough, Aqualung is here to fix all the mess. It is a music player designed from the ground up to provide continuous, absolutely transparent, gap-free playback across a variety of input formats and a wide range of sample rates thereby allowing for enjoying quality music: concert recordings and "non-best-of" albums containing gapless transitions between some tracks. (Multiple movements long compositions are often broken into separate but gaplessly flowing tracks when mastered to CD). Obvious examples are The Song Remains The Same (Led Zeppelin), The Dark Side Of The Moon (Pink Floyd), and Yessongs (Yes). Besides the ability to play the music from these records without a defect, Aqualung provides high quality sample rate conversion, a feature that is essential when building large digital music archives containing input sources conforming to various standards. Aqualung passed our test -- and it will pass yours, too.
In addition to all this, Aqualung comes with a Music Store that is an XML-based music database, capable of storing various metadata about music on your computer (including, but not limited to, the names of artists, and the titles of records and tracks). You can (and should) organize your music into a tree of Artists/Records/Tracks, thereby making life easier than with the all-in-one Winamp/XMMS playlist. Importing file metadata (ID3v2 tags, Ogg Vorbis comments, FLAC metadata) into the Music Store is supported.
Although Aqualung is officially still in beta stage, it is fairly stable for everyday use. Reports of utter failure (segmentation faults, crashes and the like) are extremely rare. In particular, we have a record of zero bugs that caused data loss or corruption since the first public release of the program. If you are looking for a player that works, Aqualung may be just what you need.
Aqualung is released under the GNU General Public License. For more info, see the Misc page.