Just the other day, I saw in my Update Manager (Ubuntu - Feisty) an upgrade for XMMS, which was a pleasant surprise. I thought the project was defunct; pushed aside in favor of Beep and Audacious. Anyone know the details here? I'd love to see it revived.

Someone in another forum said Beep was the same thing, but with a few extra bells and whistles, but I'm not yet convinced. Might just be a skin thing for me, I guess. I'm soooo superficial.

Was it for a bug fix or new features?

I think it was a compatibility update for Feisty Fawn, but still... isn't the project dead?

The updates aren't part of the original project, but are created by the people in charge of packaging them up for the distributions. They don't mean that the project is active, just that it's still popular enough for packaging and bugfix updates to continue. I've seen similar things in Debian.

But in any case, I've been using Audacious for months now, and it's great. There's really little difference between it and xmms on the outside, but it has a much nicer gtk2 file browser and configuration panel underneath. The only problem I've had is that the plugin interface has changed, so old xmms plugins may be unavailable or need updating before they can work with it. You can get some updated plugins from the Audacious page and forum, but you may have to compile them yourself.

Audacious is actually a fork of Beep, so the two are very similar, but the Beep developers have abandoned it now also in favor of a completely new design, which is the reason for the fork. So if you want an xmms that's actively being developed, Audacious is the project you want.

he Wikipedia pages on the two projects will give you a good, simple rundown, if you're interested.

I've enjoyed Audacious for the last few weeks as well, except for a few things. The CPU usage is quite a bit higher than with XMMS (5-10% load on my Athlon XP 2500+), and it doesn't know how to sort properly at all. The OSD is nice, but I wish it could tell volume changes outside of Audacious.

New version of Audacious came out today, supposed to fix most of the bugs from the 1.3 branch. I have been using audacious since I discovered it, not problems at all. Looks smoking with Winamp skins too.

My only problems with Audacious as compared to xmms are:

It takes a lot longer to load my 5000+ mp3s.
It occasionally "skips" on files that xmms plays perfectly.

It takes a lot longer to load my 5000+ mp3s.

Maybe you should rethink the way you manage them.