Audience is a minimalistic, Gstreamer-based media player written in Vala. The second Audience release is getting close and its developers have invited users to help test it. There aren't any major new features since the previous release, but a large amount of bugs have been fixed recently. So if you can help test it or just want to give it a try, read on.
Audience comes with a beautiful, minimalistic clutter-based interface and very few configuration options and is designed to play videos without getting in your way. The progress bar (which comes with previews support) along with a play/pause button, a sidebar (from where you can access the playlist and language / subtitles) toggle button and an add to playlist button are displayed at the bottom and are set to autohide by default. A few more settings can be tweaked by using Dconf editor (org > pantheon > audience).
As you can notice from the Dconf path above, Audience is designed for the elementary OS desktop (Pantheon) and it will probably become the default media player in the future. But of course, you can use it in any desktop environment.
Install Audience
Before proceeding, please note that this PPA has quite a few elementary packages that are unstable so read the PPA description before adding it.
Audience can be installed in Ubuntu 13.04, 12.10 or 12.04 (and obviously, elementary OS and other Ubuntu-based Linux distributions such as Linux Mint, etc.) by using the elementary Daily PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:elementary-os/daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install audienceArch Linux users can install the latest Audience via AUR.
And a note from Cody Garver, the main Audience developer, on how to report bugs for Audience:
We only ask that users test videos that do not play/produce errors in Totem before submitting a bug to make sure it's Audience-specific.
Report any bugs you may find @ Launchpad.
Thanks to Cody Garver for the tip!
