X Multimedia System (XMMS) is an audio player for

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

systems released under a

free software license A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder (usually the author) ...

History

XMMS was originally written as ''X11Amp'' by Peter and Mikael Alm in November 1997. The player was made to resemble

Winamp Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Since ve ...

, which was first released in May that year. As such, XMMS has supported Winamp 2 "classic" 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 In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...

, it is now released under the GPL-2.0-or-later. On June 10, 1999,

4Front Technologies NCR Corporation, previously known as National Cash Register, is an American software, consulting and technology company providing several professional services and electronic products. It manufactures self-service kiosks, point-of-sale termin ...

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 System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

MultiMedia System"; the official interpretation of the "X" is "

Cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

". In 2002, Peter Alm initiated the XMMS2 project, aiming to produce a successor to XMMS using all new code and devoted solely to audio playback.

Forks

XMMS has continued to use

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and prop ...

1.x toolkit, despite the current version being GTK 4. The primary reason for this reluctance to upgrade is that many XMMS plugins (written by third parties) are dependent on the older version of GTK+ to properly function, ''e.g.'', "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 In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods eit ...

and related projects: * The Beep Media Player, a fork of XMMS code that uses GTK+ 2, started around 2003 ** Youki, the remade continuation of Beep Media Player, started around the end of 2005 **

Audacious Audacious may refer to: * ''Audacious'' (album), a 2016 album by Cupcakke * Audacious (software) Audacious is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source audio player software with a focus on low resource use, high audio quality, ...

, a fork from Beep Media Player started around 2005 when Beep Media Player development ceased in favor of Youki * A GTK+2 based fork by Mohammed Sameer, named XMMS2. It is unrelated to the current XMMS2 project, which uses a new codebase and client/server architecture not derived from XMMS.

Features

XMMS currently supports the following

audio Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound *Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum * Digital audio, representation of sou ...

and

video file format A video file format is a type of file format for storing digital video data on a computer system. Video is almost always stored using lossy compression to reduce the file size. A video file normally consists of a container (e.g. in the Matros ...

s: * AAC support is provided by the FAAD2 library, supporting m4a files *APE

Monkey's Audio Monkey's Audio is an algorithm and file format for lossless audio data compression. Lossless data compression does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as Advanced Audio Coding, MP3, Vorbis, a ...

Codec .ape files — support provided by the mac-port project plugin *

Audio CD Compact Disc Digital Audio (CDDA or CD-DA), also known as Digital Audio Compact Disc or simply as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the ''Red Book'', one of a series of Rainbow Books (named ...

, including

CDDB CDDB, short for Compact Disc Database, is a database for software applications to look up audio CD (compact disc) information over the Internet. This is performed by a client which calculates a (nearly) unique disc ID and then queries the databas ...

via FreeDB lookup *

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference softwa ...

support is provided by a plugin in the FLAC library *

Icecast Icecast is a streaming media project released as free software maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. It also refers specifically to the server program which is part of the project. Icecast was created in December 1998/January 1999 by Jack Mo ...

and SHOUTcast streaming supported, and is compatible with

2 skins. * libmikmod supported formats (including .XM, .MOD, .IT) See: MikMod's Home *

JACK Jack may refer to: Places * Jack, Alabama, US, an unincorporated community * Jack, Missouri, US, an unincorporated community * Jack County, Texas, a county in Texas, USA People and fictional characters * Jack (given name), a male given name, ...

plug-in for support of the JACK Audio Connection Kit. * ModPlug plug-in for playing .MOD, .S3M, .XM, .IT and other famous tracker formats. * mp3PRO support is provided by a third party plugin (which does not support SHOUTcast title streaming) *

MPEG The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by ISO and IEC that sets standards for media coding, including compression coding of audio, video, graphics, and genomic data; and transmission and f ...

Layer 1,2 and 3 (Also known as

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

), using the

mpg123 mpg123 is a free and open-source audio player. It supports MPEG audio formats, including MP3. As a console application, it has no graphical user interface. mpg123's Assembly code is optimized with SIMD instructions to improve the performanc ...

library *

Musepack Musepack or MPC is an open source lossy audio codec, specifically optimized for transparent compression of stereo audio at bitrates of 160–180 (manual set allows bitrates up to 320) kbit/s. It was formerly known as MPEGplus, MPEG+ or MP+ ...

support using XMMS-Musepack plugin. *

OGG Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...

support is provided by a plug-in provided by

xiph Xiph.Org Foundation is a nonprofit organization that produces free multimedia formats and software tools. It focuses on the Ogg family of formats, the most successful of which has been Vorbis, an open and freely licensed audio format and codec ...

.org * SHN support is provided by a plug-in provided by etree. *

speex Speex is an audio compression codec specifically tuned for the reproduction of human speech and also a free software speech codec that may be used on VoIP applications and podcasts. It is based on the CELP speech coding algorithm.Xiph.OrIntro ...

high quality & ratio speech compression format via plugin * TTA support is provided by a third party plugin *UADE plug-in provides support for most

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore International, Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and sign ...

music formats * WAV *

WavPack WavPack is a free and open-source lossless audio compression format and application implementing the format. It is unique in the way that it supports hybrid audio compression alongside normal compression which is similar to how FLAC works. It ...

with support provided by a third party plugin * WMA Limited support provided by third party plugin.http://mcmcc.bat.ru/xmms-wma/ Index of /xmms-wma

Skins

XMMS has a default skin provided, but it is also possible to use any WSZ classic skins to enhance the graphic attractiveness of the player. (see attached image)

Coverviewer

xmms-coverviewer is an XMMS plugin which allows XMMS to display album art and further enhance the graphical interface of the player. (see attached image)

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Xmms Audio player software that uses GTK Audio software with JACK support Free audio software Free media players Free software programmed in C Linux media players