Many of our recent reviews have explored music players that are in an early stage of development. We’re always conscious that it can be unfair to review software too early in its lifecycle. It’s not surprising that they can miss essential functionality or lack stability and polish. Sometimes it’s best to wait until software has matured somewhat before putting it under the microscope.
Aqualung is mature software. It’s billed as an advanced music player that plays audio CDs, internet radio streams and podcasts as well as soundfiles in just about any audio format and has the feature of inserting no gaps between adjacent tracks.
Installation
We built Aqualung from source courtesy of a package in the Arch User Repository, a community-driven repository for Arch users. Aqualung depends on quite a few libraries, so if you’re new to compiling you’ll appreciate that a community user took the time to prepare the Arch package.
If you’re not using Arch or an Arch-based distro, let us know how you get on compiling the software. But check first whether your distro has a convenient package in its repositories.
We only tested the software under Manjaro, an Arch-based distro. Aqualung is cross-platform software. Besides Linux, it runs under FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Cygwin and also natively on Windows.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Memory Usage
Page 4 – Summary