DrDolittle and Random hacking.

Hello everyone. It's blogging time again.

We released DrDolittle the other day. Check it out, it has some very fancy fixes and feature additions.

I have also done some random hacking lately.

• Promoe - A winamp2 skinable XMMS2 client. We are hacking it good and hopefully it will fill a void that we had in the community.
• Last.FM tool - It will get information about top rated entries over at last.fm and create XMMS2 playlists of it.
• Music Applet - A XMMS2 proxy for the Gnome Music Applet. This fits fine into your Gnome Desktop. It's still not in the authors main branch, but I hope it will be soon :)

Have fun with XMMS2 :-)

XMMS2 0.2 DrCox

Get your dope at http://sf.net/projects/xmms2.

Now the fun starts.

MacOSX sweeties.

I've done it. It's a fulhack but it's working (at least for me).

Instead of fiddeling with fink, scons and python in macosx you can now download xmms2 binaries for MacOSX tiger! I have created a .pkg file for DrBombay that will install all the things you need.

Beware! It's not tested that much. but it should work (since all macs are almost identical).

Download it and test it here!

DrBombay

Enjoy another release by the XMMS2 team. This one fixes most critical issues found in DrAlban, except one that was found like a couple of minutes after the release by Anders. Bleh ;) It's an old bug that could lead to a deadlock in the IPC layer, it happens very seldom, so don't be alarmed.

I have not been that much involved in the DrBombay release due to real-life issuse. I am now situated in Santiago de Chile instead of Stockholm. I will live here for a year. This doesn't mean that I have quit worked on XMMS2 just that before I have everything in order over here it's kind of crazy.

Stay tuned for next release of XMMS2 which will be DrCox, we are still debating what should be included and not. Feel like contributing? Join our IRC channel and start the patching.

News from post-Alban

News from the front.

Debian-PPC deb's uploaded
I uploaded debian-ppc deb's to our debian repo today. They are not well tested, so if you running debian-ppc, please go ahead.

DrBombay
Will be released in next week probably. A number of critical fixes has gone into our trees.

DrCox
The new major release has started to get code, tilman is working on the mixerapi and I am going to start with the playlist updates soonish. Expect more about this later.

TurboX2
My webclient has more or less been drax project for the last week. It seems to get closer to a first version. Probably after DrBombay.

New intro clip.
Yesterday I commited a patch that changes the intro song. We where donated a clip by Mind.In.A.Box, excelent!

Also the In Flames live album (In Live We Trust) is brilliant. kthnxbye.

TurboGears + XMMS2 == Love

Merry Christmas everyone!

I have been at my parents place for a couple of days now. Since it's in a small town and I don't have any friends here I have been hacking a bit on XMMS2 related things. I have started a webclient that currently is called "turbox2", but since that name is corny it will probably be changed.

It uses TurboGears, a rapid webframework written in Python. It also have a lot of buzzwords! Like AJAX, DOM, web2.0 and so on ;)

It has been progressing quite quickly since a lot of people has been waiting for a client like this. Help has come from both DraX and nano.

Turbox2 is not ready for deployment quite yet, but it looks pretty. Stay tuned and have a good holliday!

XMMS2 0.2 DrAlban

So we finaly released a new version of XMMS2. It took way much longer than expected and I have a feeling that our release-often-release-early scheme is not really working. But on the other hand we where able to put a lot of nice features in there.

Magic recognition of media files:
Tilman put a lot of effort into adding this feature. Before 0.2 we looked at the file extention of each entry added to the playlist, trying to figure out (read: guess) what decoder plugin that should be used for playback. This wasn't very good. Enter the magic code. This feature adds some strings into each decoder plugin that describes the header of that fileformat. When a file is added to the playlist a couple of bytes are read from the file and it's mached against each magic describer we have.

This has a lot of advantages. We are not dependent on the fileextention and we can do same kind of matching on streams as on files.

But it also comes with disadvantages. If you experiance problems with files please submit the headers to the xmms2 team so that we can figure out if our signatures are bad.

Removal of SQLite problems
I did take under the assignment to rewrite our SQLite3 code so that it could be multithreaded and reentreant. This changed the internal API pretty heavy (you now have to aquire a session before manipulating the data). This changed was forced upon us by SQLite maintainers deciding to break the API in a minor version (well they disagree about breakage, but hey it made amaroK and xmms2 to stop work).

The new code will probably not run so well with old versions of SQLite3 (older then 3.2.6) there is also a fulhack in there that will slow things down.

New plugin additions
DrAlban introduced musepack and AAC decoding plugins. Thank juhovh and nano for the additions. Enjoy!

Write data to MediaLIB
I also added code for associating anything to a medialib entry. This can be useful in many ways! For example to put a rating, comment or override information from the files. Make sure you read the guidelines about it before you add that kind of code into you client!

All in all DrAlban is probably the best release of XMMS2 in a long time. Make sure you try it out and mabe work on a client. I will go over the changes for the next release (DrBombay) some other day.

See more here:
http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/index.php/Download_XMMS2
http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/index.php/Release:DrAlban