Aqualung was the first massive piece of open source software I was heavily involved with. I started the project in 2004 after frustration with the lack of gapless audio players in Linux. The project was hosted by SourceForge; we had our code in CVS (later SVN) and our discussions on our own not-so-silent (at the time) mailing list.

The project reached its goals pretty quickly: in a few months, I was satisfied with the abilities and the stability of the program, and deemed it satisfactory for my own use. However, the rather dismal state of Linux audio software back then meant that there was real demand for this kind of program: users started to come in. And they had a lot of feature requests. Thankfully, a few other developers also signalled interest in joining the project, and we had a lot of fun putting in ever more features. Eventually, the codebase was approximately some 70,000 lines of a C-ish mess…

Aqualung found its way into most major Linux distributions (even though we were hostile towards them by not providing regular releases – we were just living off our repo). One of them (Lubuntu) even made Aqualung their default music player for a while. Others kept referring to Aqualung as a robust, feature-rich but still lightweight music player. We got decent coverage and a lot of translation files.

After more than 10 years (most of the later ones fairly inactive), we released Aqualung 1.0 in August 2015. I handed over maintainership to long-time contributor and co-developer Jeremy Evans. His git repository is now the official repo of Aqualung. The program’s homepage has also been transferred to a subdomain of his site.