The Winamp media player was developed to run on Microsoft Windows operating systems. The last stable release of the software was released about three years ago on April 26, 2023. If you need a native Linux alternative to Winamp, Audacious is a free and open-source audio player that has a GTK-based interfrace (GTKUI),but which can also be configured with a Winamp-like interface and which supports Winamp 2 skins, i.e., Winamp .wsz files (a type of ZIP archive file). You can also migrate Winamp playlists into Audacious; it supports the standard .m3u and .m3u8 playlist formats, though you will need to modify the Windows-style file paths to be Linux-style file paths. To use Winamp playlists on a Linux system, such as an Ubuntu system, you can take the following steps.

1. Locate your Winamp playlists, which are .m3u or .m3u8 files typically located in C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Winamp\Plugins\ml\playlists where username is the relevant username. You can view the contents of that directory from a command prompt window using the command dir %appdata%\Winamp\plugins\ml\playlists since %appdata% is an environment variable pointing to the account's AppData\Roaming directory.

   A list of the playlists is contained in the playlists XML file. In that file, which can be viewed in a text editor such as the Windows Notepad, you will see data like the following:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>
   <playlists playlists="35">
   <playlist filename="plf8064.m3u8" title="Moonzic (Top Favorite Mix)" id="{8B45286F-9CF9-4A14-9045-F27EDC1ED72B}" songs="217" seconds="0"/>

   The first line above shows the version of XML in use is 1.0 and the character encoding is UTF-16. The next lines shows that, in this case, there are 35 playlists. The next line shows the filename of 1 of the 35 playlists and the title for the playlist in Winamp.

2. If the music files, e.g., the .mp3 files referenced in the playlists are not accessible from the Linux system, copy them to a location that is accessible from the Linux system. If you preserve a similar folder structure, if you need to copy or move the files, editing the playlists files will be easier. E.g., if the Winamp playlists contain paths like:

   C:\Users\Alice\Music\Artist\Album\song.mp3

   You could have a similar folder structure on Linux like the following:

   /home/alice/Music/Artist/Album/song.mp3

3. Edit the playlists files. You could use a global find and replace function in a text editor or you could update all of the files at once with sed (short for stream editor), which you can run from a Terminal window. Sed will likely already be present on a Linux system. You can verify that by using the which command, i.e., which sed, which will show you the location of the program, if it is present. Sed is also available for Microsoft Windows systems at sed for Windows. A sed command like the one below, if executed from the directory where the playlist files are located, could be made to make the needed changes if the the Windows and Linux file paths were like the ones above.

   sed -i 's|C:\\Users\\Alice|/home/alice|g; s|\\|/|g' *.m3u8

   • The -i tells sed to edit files in place, i.e., to make the changes to the specified file rather than create a new file.
   • The commands sed will use are enclosed in single quotes.
   • The s at the beginning of the command instructs sed to perform a substitution. The vertical bar is being used to separate the old string from the new replacement string. Another character could be used, such as a colon, etc.
   • The string to be replaced, C:\\Users\\Alice is placed within the first pair of vertical bars. Each backslash must be preceded by another backslash because the backslash character has a special meaning — it is an escape character. If you have a period in the replacement string, you should also precede it with a backslash, since the period (.) has a special meaning in a regular expression, also. The replacement string is enclosed within the second set of vertical bars.
   • The g that follows the 4th vertical bar indicates it is a "global" replacement operation, i.e., it should occur everywhere the original string occurs in the file.
   • The semicolon separates the first command from a second one, which indicates any backslashes in the file should be replaced with forward slashes. I.e., the backslashes that occur later in each line should also be replaced.
   • The *.m3u8 indicates that the sed commands should be applied to all .m3u files in the directory.
4. After updating the .m3u8 files, within Audacious, click on Playlist and select Import.
5. Navigate to the location of the playlist then select one by clicking on it and then click on the Import button.
6. The playlist name, e.g., plf68B in the example below, will match the filename for the .m3u/.m3u8 file. You can rename it to match the name for the playlist in Winamp by opening the Winamp playlists.xml file, which will be in the same directory as the playlist .m3u8 files, in a text editor or web browser and looking for the corresponding entry, e.g.:

   <playlist filename="plf68B.m3u8" title="Disney Classic Tunes" id="{AAD2A93E-93E9-442B-B24C-88D0BFBB4607}" songs="44" seconds="8231"/>

   Right-click on the playlist name in Audacious and choose Rename.

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[/software/audio_video/Audacious] permanent link

When I tried to play a YouTube video I downloaded as a WebM file using yt-dlp on an Ubuntu Linux system in the VLC media player application, I could hear the audio, but no video was shown. I tried opening a few other .webm videos and found I was able to view the video in some, but not others, though I was able to view the video and hear the audio in all the .mp4 and .mkv files. I tried changing the video output setting from "Automatic" to "OpenGL video output" and then "XVideo output (XCB)", which you can do by clicking on Tools, then Preferences, then Video, and then selecting those options from the dropdown list next to Output, but neither of those options resolved the problem, so I reset Output to Automatic. I was able to resolve the problem by taking the following steps, though:

1. In the VLC program, click on Tools and then select Preferences.
2. Click on Input/Codecs and change the hardware-accelerated decoding setting by clicking on the downward arrowhead next to Automatic, which will be the setting if the default setting is in effect.
3. Change the setting to Disable and then click on Save.

When I checked the Codec information for the file where I could not view the video before disabling the hardware-accelerated decoding setting, which you can do by opening an audiovisual (AV) file in VLC and then selecting Tools and Codec Information, I saw the video codec was AOMedia's AV1 Video (av01). When I checked the video codec for another WebM file where the video wasn't visible in VLC, I saw it was also the AOMedia's AV1 Video (av01) codec. Checking the video codec for .webm files where I could view the video, I saw Google/ON2's VP9 Video (VP90) for some and H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10) (avc1) for another.

Note: you can also determine the codecs used in a file using the mediainfo utility, which you can install on an Ubuntu system with sudo apt-get install mediainfo. You can check on whether it is already installed using the command which mediainfo, which would show the location of the mediainfo executable file if the application was installed, or you can use dpkg -s mediainfo, which will show details on the mediainfo package if it is installed.

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Or you can just hit Ctrl-L, i.e., the Ctrl and L keys simultaneously, to bring up the option to select the language for the audio associated with the video.

The menu that appears that allows you to pick a language also allows you to choose a subtitle file, such as a .srt file, if you have one for the video.

[/software/audio_video/WMP] permanent link

To install Amarok on a CentOS Linux system using the yum package management utility, you will first need to configure the system to check the EPEL repository for packages. Once you have done that, you can issue the command yum install amarok from the root account to install the software.

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[/software/audio_video/Amarok] permanent link

Exception Type:        EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: 'Cannot set outputURL to NULL'
terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException
abort() called

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[/software/audio_video/quicktime] permanent link

The music provided through Jamendo is free for personal use, so you can download songs musicians have provided through the service legally. Jamendo's goal is to link artists who want to share their music and music lovers around the world. Jamendo provides an opportunity for the musicians that provide their music to Jamendo to obtain revenue from music synchronization licensing, i.e., the licensing of the right to synchronize the music with visual media, such as film, television shows, advertistements, video games, website music, movie trailers, etc., and through licensing the music to be used as background music for films, TV, Internet video, such as video logs, aka vlogs, etc.

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[/software/audio_video/VLC] permanent link

VLC originated as an academic project in 1996. It was rewritten from scractch in 1998 and released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) in 2001 - see the Wikipedia article VLC media player for further details on the development history for the application.

Steps for converting a file from one format to another, e.g., a FLAC audio file to an MP3 audio format are provided here.

[/software/audio_video/VLC] permanent link

The problem was due to the fact that I hadn't right-clicked on the installation file and chosen "Run as administrator". When I aborted the installation and started over running it as administrator, the program installed successfully.

[/software/audio_video] permanent link

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[/software/audio_video/itunes] permanent link