X Multimedia System (XMMS) is an audio player for

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix 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 Uni ...

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 (software), 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 Rad ...

, which was first released in May that year. x11amp received Winamp skin support in version 0.7 on May 6, 1998. 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 or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

, it is now released under the GPL-2.0-or-later. On June 10, 1999, 4Front Technologies 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 originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

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

Cross-platform Within 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 platform, computing platforms. Some ...

". 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 software 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 proprietary s ...

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 'pitchfork') is a Eating utensil, utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with whic ...

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, 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 sound ...

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 Matroska ...

s: *

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Airborne aircraft carrier, a type of aircraft * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New ...

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 ...

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'' technical specifications, which is why t ...

, including

CDDB CDDB, short for Compact Disc Database, is a database for application software, 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 Identifier ...

via

FreeDB Freedb was a database of User-generated content, user-submitted compact disc track listings, where all the content was under the GNU General Public License. To look up CD information over the Internet, a client program calculated a hash function fr ...

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 software ...

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 (computing), server program which is part of the project. Icecast was created in December 1998/Janua ...

and SHOUTcast streaming supported, and is compatible with

2 skins. *

libmikmod A music tracker, or simply a tracker, is a type of music sequencer software for creating music. The music is represented as discrete musical notes positioned in several audio signal, channels at chronological positions on a vertical timeline. A mu ...

supported formats (including .XM, .MOD, .IT) See: MikMod's Home * JACK 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 mp3PRO is an unmaintained proprietary audio compression codec that combines the MP3 audio format with the spectral band replication (SBR) compression method. At the time it was developed it could reduce the size of a stereo MP3 by as much as 50% ...

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 International Organization for Standardization, ISO and International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC that sets standards for media coding, includ ...

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 under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

), 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 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, libvorbis. Vorbis is most common ...

support is provided by a plug-in provided by

xiph The Xiph.Org Foundation is a nonprofit organization that produces free software, 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 aud ...

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

speex {{More citations needed, date=May 2025 The Speex project is an attempt to create a free software speech codec, unencumbered by patent restrictions. Speex is licensed under the BSD License and is used with the Xiph.org Foundation's Ogg containe ...

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 produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...

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. ...

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

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...