XMMS

X Multimedia System (XMMS) is an audio player for Unix-like systems released under a free software license.

History

XMMS was originally written as X11Amp by Peter and Mikael Alm in November 1997. The player was made to resemble Winamp, 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, it is now released under the GNU General Public License.

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 MultiMedia System"; the official interpretation of the "X" is "Cross-platform".

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+ 1.x toolkit, despite a major revision of GTK (2.x) being available for several years, and the current version being GTK3. 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 and related projects:

XMMS2

XMMS2 (X-platform Music Multiplexing System 2) is a new generation of the XMMS audio player. It is a new design, written from scratch, separate from the XMMS codebase. While Peter Alm, one of the original authors of XMMS, was responsible for the initial design and coding of XMMS2 (late 2002 to early 2003), he has since passed on the responsibility of furthering the project to Tobias Rundström and Anders Gustafsson. LXMusic, the default music player application in LXDE, is an XMMS2 client.

Design concepts

XMMS2 borrows concepts from XMMS-era music players, such as playback control, a playlist, plugins, user-configurable GUI, and adds features such as a media library and a client–server design.

Like XMMS, XMMS2 has a plugin architecture; a type of modular architecture where certain functions are delegated to loadable libraries which provide particular functions at run-time. XMMS recognised five different types of plugins: