Developers working on the player have issued a beta build of Audacious that ships with optional support for PipeWire via a plugin. Since most Linux distributions, including big-names like Ubuntu and Fedora, default to PipeWire for audio handling this inclusion makes sense.
Other changes in the Audacious 43 beta include a plugin providing Opus audio decoding, support for Qt 6 and GTK3 (though the client still defaults to GTK2 on Linux), and a number of rough edges smoothed out through bug fixes.
Audacious 43 features at a glance:
- PipeWire output plugin
- Opus decoder plugin
- GTK3 support (defaults to GTK2)
- Qt 6 support (defaults to Qt 5)
- Support Ogg FLAC audio streams
- Support reading of embedded lyrics tags
- Show correct song length for audio streams
- Support song length database format in SID plugin
- Support Publisher and Catalog Number tags
- Add file filter to Export Playlist dialog
- Increase M3U file size limit from 16 MB to 256 MB
- Correctly handle libflac built without Ogg FLAC
Additionally, the alarm plugin is no longer included in Audacious due to outstanding/resolved bugs.
Audacious is free, open source software available for Linux and Windows. Stable builds can be downloaded from the Audacious website. To try the changes mentioned here you’ll need to download the Audacious 43 beta. Note that this build is NOT stable and may contain bugs.
Don’t want to tussle with bugs? Older, stable versions of Audacious are available in the repos of most major Linux distributions.