Welcome to the home of the conceptual trappings of my ideas on what a Musical audio player system would be. I’m heavily and heartily Inspired to write, since I don’t code, about concepts and hypotheticals on what works {in my mind} about what this could be(come) if utilized by others. The primary influences are my experiences with nothing akin to the ones experienced in the Windows or Mac worlds which _sucked_ IMHO. {personal opinon}.

The positive experiences began when I switched from Windows to Linux, and tried to find replacements that were brawnier or had different and to Moi, more tantalizing looks, ways of FUNctioning, or better ways of sounding… …from a Quality Standpoint. I think we’re getting there but this is about concepts about Achieving Better Avenues…

I’m heavily influenced by MPD/MPC setups… I like what I see as potential in AudioDriverSystem/AudioServer + MPD (or xmms2d)/MPC (or xmms2-client)/PulseAudio w/ ALSA dmix Global EQ via LADSPA-swh mbeq plugin (or eq.py) / Audio File Pools a la MPD (or Collections a la xmms2 via SQLite) / and of course: plugins…

I’m calling my big pie-in-the-sky daydream that I will blog about a CONCEPTUAL RENDERING named elastomer.

More on this Later… I need to do some dreaming…

I think one of the key things for XMMS2 is visibility.

Up until I read an announcement on Gentoo’s forums stating that generation 1 of XMMS was being pulled from Portage, I had no idea that XMMS, generation 1, existed, let alone a second generation concept/vision/framework/architecture/client-server-model/implementation.

After a night of insomnia, and thanks to about a POUND OR TWO of trial and error with the USE Flags in the (thank you!) zugaina overlay’s XMMS2 0.5 “Dr. Lecter” release ebuild, an experience I’ve documented on amot.wordpress.com this morning at:

http://amot.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/how-to-add-an-xmms2-installation-eqpy-and-lxmusic-client-to-your-gentoo-install-via-the-zugaina-overlay-with-layman/

and setting up LXMusic as my Client of choice, as well as turning on ReplayGain, and installing and setting up eq.py in 31-band EQ mode, I’m rocking out to my *.FLAC and *.MP3 files in a really cool way!

I’m a fairly die-hard MPD/MPC fan, fave clients are Sonata and Xfmpc, which I reeeeally wish had XMMS2 backends.

I think that’s going to be the best interim solution: Drivers or Backends for XMMS2 for the existing MusicPlayer Daemon Clients, or other *NIX or other OS Platform players…

At least… Until some design group out there fully fleshes out a from-the-ground-up XMMS2 Client.

That Implementation would be the thing that sways folks to jumping on the XMMS2 bandwagon…

If it was:

1) Totally Fresh and Unique

2) Beautiful

3) Cross-Platform

OR

4) Had some “magic” ingredient

…to sway folks away from their music player / architecture / framework / client of choice

THEN momentum would surely build for both XMMS2 as a community, a Project Brand Identity, and framework that is desired by and large.

For Me, I’ve found my way to XMMS2 in the following fashion:

1) The announcement of XMMS’s (generation 1’s) removal from Portage, Gentoo’s Package Manager (well default Package Manager/Repository)

2) The wiki for Audacious stating that it can use XMMS themes, and that it is a fork of Beep Media Player, and NOT XMMS (generation 1)

3) Curiousity, I then wondered WHAT this XMMS entity was… So I randomly browsed the web for it, being an audio nut that I am, got interested when I found out it was yet another audio player, nay, multimedia framework. Colour me intrigued. Oh and the Google searches pulled up references to XMMS2

4) The Google References pulled up XMMS2 while I was researching XMMS (generation 1)

5) I found the XMMS2 Project page and wiki… Started reading… Saw………

6) Saw… A BEAUTIFUL ICON!!! Can’t stress it enough! The ICON pulled me in. Sad, shallow, but true. Beauty is skin/svg/png deep! *chuckle*

7) *thought* If they designed such a beautiful Icon for the replacement / renewal / reinvigoration of such a venerable multimedia (now audio only, which is better… being focused is better!) framework, I’m really interested to see and hear and read what that community has been up to and has in the works for their project(s)!

*fooey* It’s in development. Is it in Portage?

9) NO.

10) Is there an unsupported ebuild bug on bugs.gentoo.org? If so there could be an overlay for it too…. hmm… lets see…

11) Sure enough I find (unfortunately???) A BOATLOAD of ebuild, git, source, x4x, waf, scons, and overlay options. OMFG. What do I do _now_

12) Being in uncharted territory isn’t new for this Gentoo’. So I went to the wiki and started researching installation methodologies. Where’s the simple surefire guide. OH. darn. I’m going to have to play and then write one. fooey.

13) I decided on a Client finally. Shellac to be exact. Minimal. PyGTK+. CONfigUrABLE. Or so I thunked.

14) I go for the zugaina overlay, via Layman. Whew! Decision made.

15) Crap it won’t build. Now I’m *irked* Playtime. Ego. Frustration. Competition for MPD?? Now I _want_ to hear what XMMS2 can do. *rolls up sleeves* *brews coffee*

16) Experimentation with USE flags… Take 1… 2… 3… eleventy-seventy-two…

17) AHA! Moment! Success! version 0.5 of XMMS2 “Dr. Lecter” as it’s called, manages to build and install successfully with _most_ of the interesting options available.

18) Rather Major Learning Curve. *why am I not surprised* “Oh well, it took a week to get MPD off the ground and spun up, so what the hell!”

19) Get XMMS2 Configured & xmms2d running

20) hmm… audio output probs… ALSA blah blah. I want PulseAudio. Wiki Time.

22) Finally find the Right Stuff on the XMMS2 Wiki. GREAT! A template!

23) *this should be _EASIER_*

24) Learn how to configure xmms2d. Do so.

25) Learn how to play music. Do so. TEST SUCCESSFUL!!! —> THIS THING PLAYS MUSIC (well audio, lets see about Music)…

26) Shellac doesn’t work. effe me. *anger* Lotsa Google. OH. Dr. DoLittle release. WTF is that?? Google. OLD… RElease.

27) Waste 4 hours downgrading XMMS2 & playing with USE Flags to get the Dr. DoLittle release ebuild installed.

28) Shellac. Well. It’s broken. OH, and crufty. Quite old too. Darn.

29) Client Matrix Time. Time. Time Time. Movie. Food. Coffee. Time. Wiki. Matrix —> LXDE’s LXMusic looks A LOT like Xfce’s Xfmpc. Sold.

30) Waste 2 or 3 more hours with stupid USE Flags Upgrading from Dr.DoLittle to Dr.Lecter (0.5) for LXMusic.

31) Where’s my GUIDE. Definitely better write one. Not just for altruism anymore, but because I could have saved HOURS if I’d written notes. Dagnabbit.

32) I realize I’m a little tired and some of this stuff happened before configuring xmms2d, whoops I need to go to bed soon… HOWEVER (the music sounds good!!! it’s not just ‘audio’.)

33) Figure out how I want LXMusic to be configured.

34) Play with it a bit. All seems cool. Not bad. Stripped down, but Serviceably Functional. I like the Daemon / Tray Process + Icon w/ Right Click Menu / Client Interface / SQLite DB… It swallowed my entire Music collection with all 7568 entries without a hiccup. Too bad there isn’t a Filename mode. Nothing’s _perfect_.

35) Add config for ReplayGain. Works. Yay!!…

36) Discover, install, tweak, and CANT FRIGGIN BELIEVE MY SOUNDCARD after mating XMMS2 to the eq.py in 31-band Graphic EQ. I extrapolate the settings based on my COWON iAUIDO O2PMP’s “POP” 10-band Graphic EQ setting. Play a little tiny bit. $old!!!

37) Now I’m LISTENING to XMMS2’s capability to render audio as Music.

38) I’m LUCKY.

39) Got an Auzen X-Meridian 7.1 channel High Fidelity Sound Card. It uses C-Media’s CMI-8788 “Oxygen” DSP chip. It’s no Reference design: It was specifically designed for Audiophiles:: Solid Capacitors with room to spare, Custom Circuit Design & Power Layout, User Upgradable OP-Amps (The IC Chips that amplify and assuage electricity and power from mere electrons into doing a harmonic little dance inside your sound card). I’ve paid through the nose and upgraded to Texas-Instrument Burr-Brown Division OPA627AU + Adaptor 8-pin SOIC OP-Amp packages that were put together by Auzen Tech with high-silver content solder, etc etc… The card has eight channels total, 4 stereo channels, so it was a hefty investment in 4 OPA627AU OP-AMP packages… The Card Sings Like A Canary! Literally a silver-throated songbird!

40) I’ve been listening through the night on some really nice headphones:
Phonak Audeo PFE 122’s (5Hz – ~17kHz), v-moda bass freq’s (8Hz – 22kHz), Grado SR-60’s (20Hz – 20kHz) and etymotic ER*4-P’s (20Hz – 20 kHz) then this morning when everybody left, I got to bump my Creative Inspire T7700’s (7.1 Surround Sound Speaker System designed by Cambridge Soundworks).

41) I know this post is lenghty, but so has been my night, my experience with audio, music, the installation process of XMMS2, eq.py, and LXMusic, and my path to sublimation in sound.

42) I had thought I’d heard it all when I heard MPD/Sonata, or Audacious w/LADSPA-swh Plugin MBEQ properly configured. Boy… I’m happy to say XMMS2 was a successful experiment and transmogrification from listening to mere music to listening to the smoothest, most articulate, blackest, silveryest, cleanest, FUNnest, most exciting MUSIC I’ve ever heard.

CLEAN rendering. Just gorgeous sound. If it had legs I’d ask it out on a date.

43) I’m an XMMS2 Convert. Thanks!

file:///usr/local/portage/layman/zugaina

=media-sound/xmms2-0.5.ebuild
-mdns -avcodec -java -ecore -phonehome aac alsa eq flac mp3 mp4 oss python speex vorbis xml rss wma ao avahi cdda -coreaudio fam jack modplug musepack ruby sid xspf -asx -cpp -lastfm -mms -ofa perl -samba -shout nophonehome -clientonly -daap diskwrite -curl

These USE flags were necessary to get xmms2 release 0.5 aka “DrLecter” from the Zugaina Overlay for Gentoo.

Please google or check the forums for setting up a layman installation and what overlays are and how to use them before following this guide.

If you’re just finding your footing with Gentoo or have never done an overlay or a layman install, feel free to ask for directions or to be directed to the right docs!

forums.gentoo.org and some keyword searches should do you fine for the most part.

Getting started:

If you have layman installed, add the zugaina overlay by following these instructions:

Add the following commands to into your terminal as root:

layman -L

layman -a zugaina

layman -S

emerge –sync

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~amd64″ emerge =media-sound/xmms2-0.5.ebuild -mdns -avcodec -java -ecore -phonehome aac alsa eq flac mp3 mp4 oss python speex vorbis xml rss wma ao avahi cdda -coreaudio fam jack modplug musepack ruby sid xspf -asx -cpp -lastfm -mms -ofa perl -samba -shout nophonehome -clientonly -daap diskwrite -curl

…The above block of code should allow you, on amd64 or ~amd64 arch’es to successfully emerge the XMMS2 Framework/Client/Server.

Next up, Following the directions from the XMMS2 site…

1. Start the daemon:

xmms2-launcher

…this script launches the xmms2d daemon and daemonizes it for use with CLI or GUI clients.

2. Add some music:

xmms2 add /home/foo/music/awesome.ogg

… this passes the xmms2 CLI client the command “add” and the absolute path (location in your filesystem) of “awesome.ogg” Of course you MUST substitute “foo” with your particular USERNAME, and the location where you store YOUR music may differ.

Also you may have a collection of *.FLAC files, like Moi, or *.MP3 files, etc, ad infinitum…

3. Play:

xmms2 play

… will initiate playback of your music, or at least the sample file that ships with XMMS2.

IF You Encounter Trouble…

Like I did. Follow these Instructions, especially if you get some hinky message about an output plugin. YOU Should KNOW what type of Audio Plugin and Audio System you use. Odds are that if you’re a normal Gentoo user it will be ALSA, and if you’re following along from Ubuntu or its brethren it’s PulseAudio.

I like PulseAudio for some gosh darned reason on my Gentoo Box, .:{empathy}:. 1.0 , hey don’t judge! Hands off! MY software freedumb! My decisions! Helpful comments always welcome…

So I had to go through the following to get XMMS2 set up on my PulseAudio-equipped system…

$ xmms2d start -v

with the “start” option, to start it of course! as well as the “-v” or “–verbose” flag to get diagnostic messages in your terminal window. You’ll probably need these on your first boot of the Daemon.

OOH! I said the terms “boot” and “daemon” in the same sentence! Don’t be shy! Or frightened! It’s really quite alright…

That just starts the daemon with verbose logging (output) in your terminal window. With me still? OK!

Next up, confguring or setting your Audio System Plugin.

For Moi, and other PulseAudio users, the plugin is named “pulse”. Not “PulseAudio” or “default.pa” or “pa”. “pulse”. :-p

ALSA users, it may depend on which ALSA plug you use, such as plug hw:0,1 or dmix:0,1 etc… I’m NOT SURE.

Pulse Users, Please follow along…

OK so on to the nitty gritty:

$ xmms2 config output.plugin pulse

the “$” sign denotes utilizing the terminal with user permissions rather than “#” which implies a root shell/terminal which of course impleis root permissions & access.

You should be all set up to use the output from the PulseAudio Plugin now.

You may also at this point need to export your UNIX Socket which goes like this for BASH users:

export XMMS_PATH=”unix:///tmp/my-socket-aka-username-goes-here”

xmms2 list

…and you should get confirmation (you are using verbose output aren’t you?? It helps!) that your socket is set.

Non BASH shell users: tsch or csch users would do the dance like so:

setenv XMMS_PATH “unix:///tmp/my-socket”

xmms2 list

…and away we go!

You may now want to restart or launch your xmms2d via:

xmms2d restart -v

OR

xmms2-launch -v

…hopefully without any further errors.

On to a few tricks…

ReplayGain:

xmms2 config effect.order.0 replaygain

xmms2 config replaygain.enabled 1

…and that’ll do it for ReplayGain!

Now for a couple of recommendable Clients. Y’all know I’m into Xfce, and as no Xfce XMMS2 Player or Panel Plugin that I know of.

However, the LXDE project does have LXMusic, which mimics somewhat the feel of a stripped down offspring of Sonata and Xfmpc… but for XMMS2.

It’s located here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=180858&package_id=211053

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=180858&package_id=211053&release_id=647740

…for version 0.2.3 which is what I’m using currently.

Here’s a screenie:

http://blog.lxde.org/wp-content/gallery/lxde_screenshots/lxmusic.png

…so as you can see it’s a fairly straightforward, rather nice-looking no-frills GTK+ Player. Schweet. I’m into minimalism.

There’s also eq.py, which is NECESSARY as it gives you a 31-band Graphic EQ.

It’s provided by the author just as a python script, so you have to download it, inspect it to your satisfaction, (by that I mean read it and see if it’s OK to your security tastes… it’s plain code), then copy it to:

# /usr/bin/eq.py

AND

# chmod 755 /usr/bin/eq.py

AND

# env-update && source /etc/profile

…that’ll install it quite nicely.

To utilize it, just open a user terminal and type:

eq.py

…and press ENTER.

Now to fiddle…

Here are my settings:

eq.py client /usr/bin/eq.py

preamp=0
legacy=o
extra filtering=x
bands=31
3.5
4.0
5.0
5.5
6.0
6.5
2.0
2.5
2.0
0.0
0.0
1.0
2.0
3.0
4.0
5.0
5.5
6.0
6.5
7.0
6.5
8.0
8.0
7.5
7.0
6.5

Sounds STELLAR!! && Smooooooth!

Designed to mimic the POP EQ on my COWON iAUDIO O2PMP (which has a 10-band EQ, so I extrapolated a bit)…

With that…

I bid you adieu for now!

Si les gusta tener en el panel varios applets, aqui hay uno que les permite manejar su reproductor favorito:

Music Applet tiene soporte para Amarok, Amarok2, Audaciouos, Banshee(pre-1.0), Banshee, Exaile, MPD, Muine, Quod Libet, Rythmbox, VLC, XMMS, XMMS2.

Lo pueden bajar de aquí(paquete deb).

Nota: Si usan amarok 1, y no los deja usarlo en complementos, instalen:

sudo aptitude install python-kde3

sudo aptitude install python-dcop

Bueno  pues espero que les sirva de algo

Ich hatte mich ja gestern beschwert, dass der CPU-Load von XMMS2 zu hoch sei (30%-50%). Hab heute die Lösung (im Internet) gefunden:

XMMS2 stoppen (nicht als root, sondern als ausführender Benutzer)
nickolsen@ocelot:~$ xmms2 stop
Das Output-Plugin auf “null” umbiegen
nickolsen@ocelot:~$ xmms2 config output.plugin null
Config value output.plugin set to null
XMMS2 wieder starten. Bei mir war der CPU-Load nun auf 0%-5%.
nickolsen@ocelot:~$ xmms2 stop
Output-Plugin wieder auf “alsa” einstellen
nickolsen@ocelot:~$ xmms2 config output.plugin alsa
Config value output.plugin set to alsa
Dafür als Alsa-Device nicht “default” sondern hw:0,0 benutzen
nickolsen@ocelot:~$ xmms2 config alsa.device hw:0,0
Config value alsa.device set to hw:0,0
Et voila, CPU-Load schwirrt unter 10% rum. Damit kann ich leben!

GSoC Mentors Summit in all glory, but all sessions and no hack made drax and me dull boys… enter Skidbladnir to bring joy to life!

After a day of slow sessions, me hacking on Abraca, while drax hacking on a new web 2.0 client we decided that enough was enough, time to get some collaboration going.

I actually came up with the idea a really long time ago, while Service Clients was just an vague idea in the minds of drax, theefer, and the wanderers.

As I live in Sweden, home of the fast Internets, I know that a whole lot of people would be very happy if their favorite music player had easy access to, everyones favorite, The Pirate Bay for getting more content.

A typical scenario would be that I was playing some song by Timbuktu, and my music player would automagically notice that I’m missing that new single that Timbuktu, one of Swedens most popular artists, officially released first to the world on The Pirate Bay *hint hint hint all other artists* and then present a link to that torrent for me to click on, and download using my favorite torrent client.

This feature is so hot that ALL XMMS2 clients should have it, thus we wanted to do this as a Service Client.

So late saturday afternoon just before we left Googleplex I started to update the xmmsclient python bindings to match the Service Client branch my student had written during GSoC. Meanwhile drax was working on getting his webclient ready and some helpers to count string distance between Freebase data and some mock Pirate Bay torrent names. Due to jetlag my evening ended early for me, but when waking up somewhere around 3AM I had a great message from The Pirate Bay waiting for me about getting early access to their upcomming webservice API. The rest of the sunday was spent frantically hacking the python bindings so that we could have a running demo before I had to leave for the airport and it worked! Around 2.45PM we made the first working request from the service client and I ran to the bus.

So to summarize what this client does:

1. Register as a service client that accepts an artist (string) as argument.
2. Accept request.
3. Find albums by artist in medialibrary.
4. Find albums by artist in Freebase.
5. Find albums by artist in The Pirate Bay.
6. Subtracts the albums in medialibrary from the albums returned by Freebase.
7. Calculates string distance from what’s left of Freebase result with The Pirate Bay result to get good names pointing to correct but crappy torrent names.
8. Return a list of albums missing in the medialibrary by some artist, with links to download.

Right.. and the name Skidbladnir refers to the ship of Freyr that sails the Scandinavian intern^H waters with fair wind, and folds easily into ones pocket.

PTSD, I miss google…
I want to go back…
I want to hack…
take me back…

I’m not a GUI designer, but (…) I still get ideas every once in a while. My last post on the subject turned into an OpenMoko client based on the sliding GUI idea thanks to Anders. This time I present to you three more ideas.

First out, an MTV-isch OSD.

The idea behind this is obviously MTV. Over the years they’ve outdone themselves in the design of new fresh OSD’s to present their artists. The OSD’s are often animated, and always very pleasant to the eye. When looking at the OSD’s available for different music players, none of them comes near. Som just print text on the screen, that disappears after a couple of seconds, some add fading to make it a bit prettier, some use the notification area of GNOME to present the current artist, and some use Growl on OS X, and none of these look very pretty, they just look like half-assed attempts at presenting the current song.

A year or two ago I was into writing C# bindings for XMMS2, and I whipped up this example that made an attempt at creating an animated OSD.

Here is the screencast.

This is obviously butt ugly as IANAGD, but it shows a glimpse of what may be the future of OSD’s. Perhaps using EFL might be the way to go to get thos animations blinging. Anyway the code and the tools are of no importance without a good design, so copying designs from MTV to start with, and then evolve those to something new, fresh and free could probably lead to something interesting.

Another interesting design is the flowers from the Moppi Productions Assembly 2004 invitation demo, linked to the music. This could definitely be written as an OSD to XMMS2, as we now have a great visualization API thanks to the Google Summer of Code. The demo is for Windows, but works great in wine. In an OSD these flowers would grow out around the OSD box, and then anti-grow back when the box is to be closed.

Second out, drag-n-drop cover art.

I have no idea why many of my ideas are related to cover art, as I don’t really think they are that important, but here is another good thing to have. The ability to drag an image from Firefox, drop it in the cover art area of the client, and the client downloads the image and sets it as the default cover art of the current song (or album). The point here is that it should be as easy as possible to set the cover art. It’s a changeable target, and it should be easy to change it. Other than drag-n-drop it should definatly support copy/paste too. Drag/drop, copy/paste should ofc both handle urls, and data pasts/drops.

And here’s the obligatory screencast.

Third out, LastFM buttons.

The way LastFM works is a bit disturbing to the music player. When a LastFM stream is activated you either have to change the GUI, or be dysfunctional. The last alternative sucks a bit, as the power of LastFM is only unleached if you can skip tracks, otherwise you could just aswell listen to regular shoutcast. I prefer music players with three buttons for playback control, [prev, (play|pause), next], so some days ago I realized that this happens to be the same amount of buttons required to control LastFM, so why not combine them? I still haven’t decided in detail how this should work, but I wrote a small demo application that, when a LastFM stream starts, the three playback-buttons become LastFM buttons. You can access the original buttons by holding the mouse over the controls for a few seconds, this could also be handled with holding shift or something.

Anyway, here’s the obligatory screencast.

And this is all for this time, hope some of the ideas are put into use in some clients.

Time to indulge in all the Christmas food. Merry Christmas everyone! \o/

After having talked about setting up a BuildBot service for XMMS2 for 6-7 months I finally got my shit together a couple a days ago and did it.

For now we have three slaves running, Debian Etch, mingw32 and Freebsd 7. The latter two have already helped us locate one bug each and a fix for one of them has been merged. In the near future a Mac OS X slave will be added, and Anders has mentioned that an ARM Scratchbox slave might happen.

The BuildBot setup currently online is just the first step in improving the quality of the XMMS2 project. When DrK is out and the Google Summer of Code testing framework project has been merged, tests will automatically be run on all builds, and hopefully catch even more bugs thus save a tear or two from our users.

Also, when I get the time I will make the mingw32 slave produce snapshots for download to make it easier to run XMMS2 on that strange OS we are forced to use in unfortunate times.

Click here to get the latest build status.

Update: The ARM slave is now up and running.

Update: The Darwin slave is also up, and yet another bug found.

In the world of XMMS2 there are a heap of clients that more or less rip the design from something that already exists. Some clients have potential, while a lot of clients are just “Hey, I has writes my 0wnz0r music player!! zomgbbqzuhl!!11!”. Though this kind of sucks when new users find XMMS2 and have to wade through an ocean of crap, it also reflects how easy it is to whip up a GUI connected to a real application so that you can try out new concepts in a live environment without much hazzle, which is a good thing<tm>.

I myself am far from a GUI designer, but every once in a while I come up with some idea that I actually decide to implement. The downside is that I’ve never as of yet put my ideas together into a whole client but instead they end up in my ~/dev_home directory and bitrot, so here comes two ideas that I haven’t seen anyone experiment with, that with some luck might get picked up by some client author.

First out, an attractive info dialog.

Basically looks like the standard old info dialog that we have seen before, but with the coverart switcher added. The idea is that when you drag your mouse over the image you get a number of alternative images. We have the xmms2-covers client that surfs the net for coverart and then adds them to the entries in the media library, it’s pretty common that some art is found at multiple places in a variety of qualities, and the user should easily be able to pick one of them, or optionally pick one from file.

So some weeks back I wrote two implementations of this kind of view.

clutter based version
gtk based version

It’s not a feature that propells your client to the moon with, but imho also the tiny parts should get their fair share of time and thought to give a rich user experience (without offending the user with too much bling ofc).

Second out, Sliding GUI.

The idea was to have a simple GUI that only showed information to the user relevant to the current use case. This was accomplished by having a small number of cards (3 in my example) that slide, like the desktop switch effects on Mac OS X and Compiz. The first card was to show coverart in 90% of the screen and then artist – title (and maybe album), the second card held the playlist, and the third card was undefined. By pressing tab the next card slides in, and when reaching the last card, a final slide occurs passing all cards until the first card is visible. Later I realised that this is kind of how the iPod works, evil Apple manipulating my brain!

Anyway, here’s a screencast.

This idea could actually be implemented for Esperanza. There would be two cards then, one for coverart/artist/title (card A), and one for the playlist (card B). When moving focus and/or mouse out from Esperanza card A would be shown, and when focused/entered card B would be shown. Alternatively card B could be shown on focus/enter, and after a timeout card A could be shown.

Conclusion (IANAGD)

I think it’s more important to question the reason for each part of the gui, than to have a gazillion features, and it would probably not be a bad idea if the GTK client writes unite, and some goes for the QT client writers. Also, with the exception of Euphoria, no clients as of yet take advantage of animated GUI components. It’s very easy to add animations here and there without making the GUI unusable, and it can add to the user experience, so why not take advantage of it? Oh, and I also want to see more web-awareness folks!

There, I’ve said it, time to hit the sofa and wait for the perfect client<tm>

(Oh, and the code for the above hacks exists, ask me on irc if you really want to see, mostly really really …. *zzz* …. really nasty hacks).

Es un paquete de los que más uso y que me parece muy útil.

Es compatible con los siguientes reproductores:

• Banshee
• Exaile
• MPD
• Muine
• Quod Libet
• Rhythmbox
• XMMS
• XMMS2

Yo lo uso para controlar el reproductor Rhythmbox desde la barra de Gnome, de forma que cuando el rhythmbox está cerrado, nos aparecerá un icono del reproductor, pero que si se está ejecutando algo, nos aparecen los típicos controles de retroceder, pausar y avanzar en la reproducción del archivo pertinente.

Si queremos instalarlo, únicamente debermos activar los repositorios universe de nuestro Ubuntu y hacer:
sudo apt-get install music-applet
Y para visualizarlo simplemente le hacemos click derecho en el panel y le damos a añadir al panel, seleccionamos dentro de multimedia->music-applet y ya lo tenemos listo.

Last night, I was feeling kinda crappy, and didn’t want to sit in a chair. Laying down sounded like a great idea.
But, without sitting in my chair, I can’t pick and choose the tunes I wanted to listen too. Woe is me, for I wouldn’t have my favorite music to sooth the rumbling savage beast from within!

But wait, XMMS2 is here to save the day!
All I had to do was install the XMMS2 clientlib, install my choice of client, and XMMS2’s TCP communication does the rest!

However, there’s a snafu; the music only plays AT THE SERVER. In a stock XMMS2 setup, you can have a client anywhere, but the server will be the only source of actual audio output.
(The exception comes when you use an output plugin such as ices and stream to an icecast server, but that’s for another entry.)

For me, this was a non-issue. My server/xmms2d was in the same room, so all I had to do was turn on the speakers (and since it was 11PM and getting later by the minute, plug in headphones as well).

I laid in bed with headphones on, typing away on a laptop. Also using gxmms2 on that laptop to control an application on a desktop I wasn’t sitting at.
No delay in communication either, the server responded as soon as I sent the request from the gxmms2 client.

Another trivial but still cool feature is that all the processes on the server run like normal. (Obvious, but still cool.)
gx2osd (see my previous post on the subject) ran like normal, which I noticed after after connecting over x11vnc to my desktop.
xmms2-scrobbler continued to submit played songs, and gxmms2 on the server ran like normal, receiving all the playback statuses, playlist changes, and so on.

In short, I never had to leave my bed, and wound up falling asleep with my headphones still on.

Active music listeners on Gentoo have began creating an uproar over the imminent doom of XMMS.

The current situation is that XMMS (the package), all it’s plugins (xmms-mad, xmms-arts, xmms-eq, xmms-spc, etc.) have been masked. If you’ve installed it, it’ll hand around, just don’t expect it to ever get updated. And don’t even bother filing bugs, xmms has gone unmaintained; many have tried, all of them have had to stop, hence why this issue on masking/removing xmms is coming around again. The xmms useflag is also masked on all packages that have it (hint: `equery hasuse xmms`). A few packages (mplayer, amarok) depend on elements of xmms if you had its use flag enabled, and they will be subsequently broken should xmms be purged from your system.

Forewarning Side Note:
If you unmerge xmms, and disable the xmms use flag, run revdep-rebuild IMMEDIATELY.
[edit]
Insanity has a few more details that will help you to further this along.

This is quite an inconvenience, I agree, because XMMS is amazing. It was the first Linux music player I ever used, I loved it, it has an absolutely awesome arsenal of plugins for various functions, and supports so many audio formats it’s not even funny.
All of that would be fine, if xmms wasn’t so old and missing so many more important core functions.

Earlier this year, xmms finally frustrated me past my limit. From gtk crash bugs, to the absolutely nuisance of my mp3 files being -28519:0 in length. I asked around, and demo’ed a few of the alternatives.
Amarok was fun. It looked nice, it ran nice, it had absolutely excellent features, but unfortunately, it plays back and runs abysmally over a network share (may be Samba specific, I do use Samba mounts to my media drives). There were gaps between songs in the measure of seconds, terribly distracting when listening to a nonstop, even leisurely listening becomes aggrivated.

I used bmp and audacious, which had the same lackluster flare as xmms, except worse since a few key plugins were not compatible.

I tried JuK for a while, but that was just boring.

And then, after poking around at xmms.org for a while, there was a newspost on a next generation “XMMS2″ software currently in development. I’d link you directly to the article, but even the XMMS website is old and missing a few ‘nice’ features. Just hit up the website and hit end (Scroll to the bottom). You’ll see an entry labeled “XMMS2 Development Release 1″.

Being the bleeding edge type of person I am, and since I was still on the look out for a good alternative audio player, I took the plunge. After working it on my own for a while, I finally joined the #xmms2 chatroom (Freenode IRC) in order to torment the developers for all eternity.

Since then, I’ve found a new favorite audio player, for reasons stemming from concept, to structure, and the existence of the work that has been done, and is continuing to be done.

Before I go on, let me make one thing very very clear.
XMMS2 is NOT XMMS1. XMMS2 is a ground up rewrite, with drastically different ideas, and a drastically different design.
If you need XMMS1 features, and are not willing to change, stop reading this and go back to your XMMS1, or check out Audacious, or bmp/bmpX.

Frankly, I’m done. XMMS is old, and I stopped using Winamp ages ago (relevance: look, feel, functionality).
I moved to Foobar2000 before leaving Windows as my primary desktop, FB2K is miniscule and oh so flexible. If you haven’t figured that out already, remember it.

So, why I chose XMMS2 and why it’s seriously attractive:

• XMMS2 is a client<->server based music player, not unlike MPD. (MPD fanboys, XMMS2 is not a fork, nor a “rip-off”, please see XMMS2 vs. MPD.
  This means that the server is the backbone to the system, and music plays where the server resides. ‘Clients’ send commands to the server, and the server reacts as necessary.
  XMMS2, when installed, has 2 things. The xmms2d (xmms2 daemon / music server), and the command line xmms2 binary, used to actually perform tasks. That’s it.
  No GUI, no ncurses based menuing / control system, no webterface, no nothing. Which brings me to my next point.
• The choice, is yours!
  XMMS2 does not ship with software that you’re stuck in using. Gnome fans, go pick a GTK client.
  KDE fans, go pick a Qt client.
  Enlightenment fans, they have EFL based clients for you too.
  And of course, you pioneers of minimalism can pick out a console client which are bit easier to use than the cli binary that ships with xmms2 itself.
• If a client doesn’t offer a feature you want (current hot item: cover/album art), pick a different one. If a client doesn’t work in {X,Y,Z} manner, pick a different one. If you use Gnome but the GTK clients suck, pick a Qt client. If you use KDE but the Qt clients suck, pick a GTK one. (Repeat ad nauseum for all remaining toolkits.)
• One client is not meant to do everything, you will very highly have multiple “clients” running in tandem.
  A client is not a gui. A client is not a playback/playlist application. I regularily have 4 clients running (in no particular order):
  • xmms2-et; a ‘phone home’ client that reports usage data. Used mostly for new releases, to ensure all plugins are adequately tested. (Ships with XMMS2 core package.)
  • xmm2-scrobbler; as the name would suggest, this is a ruby-based xmms2 client that submits scrobbler entries to Audioscrobbler/Last.fm. This client does not have a gui in any form, nor any interactivity. Set up your auth information, and it runs and runs and runs on it’s own accord.
  • gxmms2; a GTK client. This client is how I handle all my playlisting and playback control.
  • gx2osd; a GTKMM-based OSD client. Pops up a window for 3 seconds with the currently playing song, artist, and cover art (if present). Customizable, reorganizable, all around helpful.

  I also have special use clients, and clients I use for testing purposes / feedback to their respective authors.

  • Turbox2; a python based web interface client that was developed as part of Google’s Summer of Code. One of the many clients I decimated with the sheer size of my library, but was improved to get around the issue. Also features album art.
  • xmms2covers; do I really need to explain this one? Run it, it scrawls certain music repositories looking for art (includes CDs, Vinyls, front, back, jacket, and artist art).
  • Esperanza; an up and coming Qt4 client that is minimalist and highly functional in nature. Supports cover art, and Growl notifications (local and remote). Great for Mac users, or you can just forward the notifications to a Mac on your network.
  • Insanity; another python (pyGTK2, specifically) client that was also decimated in the past by the size of my medialib, but has rapidly improved to become another sleek and responsive client, offering a very different and clean look. Highly functional, subtle differences, but it works like a gem. Supports cover art too!

  There have been times in which I’ve run multiple playlist/playback clients at the same time (for example, gxmms2/insanity/esperanza simultaneously), and they all stay in sync for both the playback progress, as well as any playlist changes propagate through every client.

• What does it all mean? It means that I can use whatever I want, you can use whatever you want, we’ll have a difference in client features and yet be using the same underlying software (gasp).
• What this also means is that I can control XMMS2 from any computer, I don’t even need to have the server installed.
  XMMS2 also features TCP communication, so I can use any computer in my house, or do some ssh tunneling magic and use a computer outside of my house (handy for situations like using ices and being away from home).
  Oh right, did I mention that xmms2d can output in any of; alsa, jack, esd, or even ices?

I haven’t even touched the surface about xmms1’s lack of a medialib, xmms2’s prolific one with an excellent schema (what other client allows you to search ANY metadata located in your files? You tagging zealots that include Catalog number and publisher will have a field day with this feature), compatibility with decoding FLAC, MOD, APE, MP3, AAC, MPC, OGG, SID, WAV, WMA files, nor have I mentioned the fact that xmms2 can read from plain filesystem files, DAAP shares (read: iTunes music library on another computer), Last.fm radio stations, MMS shares, HTTP URIs, and this is one messed up run-on sentence.

All I’m saying is that XMMS2 is under active development, and already has a great base to continue forth on. If you’re interested, start reading and get started.
Gentoo users, well maintained contributed ebuilds are located at Ycarus’ Site (I’ll ask him about getting his repo into layman, feel free to contact him and request the same).

Homebrew developers, I would absolutely love to see PSP and Nintendo DS playback/playlist clients, that would absolutely make my day.
Add in a little sound redirection magic on my end to pipe the sound output to my bedroom computer (instead of the main room computer which is where the server runs), and I’d be able to control the music from anywhere in my house and listen almost as prolifically too.

The bottom line? XMMS is old. Highly functional, and hugely popular, but all good things come to and end, and XMMS has had a great run.
Use whatever appeals to you, use whatever satisfies your needs; I know I am.

I’ve started my voyage into bluetooth land now and it has been some confusing days.

I spent about three hours on google just to find out that you couldn’t connect to localhost with bluetooth. This means I have to do some of the work correctly the first time instead (or debug the application on the phone, bleh). About 10 minutes later I luckily found out that it was possible to write the Service Discovery part against localhost by using the address “0xFFFFFF000000″. Then I went on to figure out how this UUID-stuff worked and now I can actually discover my “XMMS2 Remote Control” service from my phone. Yey! I used AvetanaBT to implement this part. It is a JSR-82 compatible java framework that runs on J2SE.

Today I’ve been learning about GIOChannels and refreshing my UNIX socket programming knowledge. I realised that I could write quite a bit locally by writing a J2ME compatible java Client that connects over tcp to a test server. I’ve given up on extending Bemused’s protocol as it doesn’t fit my needs at all. So this evening/night have also been used to figure out what the protocol should look like, and a some minutes ago I compiled the first working version that communicates ints and strings.

Requesting the playlist for example looks like this:

Client -> Server :
CMD_PLAYLIST_LIST, CMD_END

Server -> Client :
ANS_PLAYLIST_LIST, size, UINT, 1, UINT, 2, UINT, 3, ANS_END

I will probably not document this protocol as I intend to write the server as platform independent as possible. It currently runs on Linux, but with some minor changes it also compiles on FreeBSD. The bluetooth connection will be abstracted so that it can be replaced by tcp if someone cares to write such a module, or perhaps diffrent bluetooth apis (OS X, Wintendo). And maybe the player communication will be abstracted so that any music player with similar features (playback, playlist, medialib) can benefit from this project by adding a corresponding module.

When I originally wrote the build.xml for this project my main goal was just to get it to work. This lead to a really crappy handling of preverify where you had to add the class files manually as preverify doesn’t search subdirectories for class files. So today I finally got tired of having to edit build.xml every time I added a new class, or renamed an old one. Unfortunatly Google let me down except for some outdated J2ME Ant extensions, but after deciphering the Ant manual I came up with this vanilla Ant code:

<!-- Find class files. -->
<fileset dir="${build}" id="tmp">
  <patternset>
      <include name="**/*.class">
  </patternset>
</fileset>

<!-- Convert filenames to valid preverify input. -->
<!-- From: /absolute/path/to/package/SomeFile.class -->
<!-- To: package.SomeFile -->
<pathconvert pathsep=" " property="unverified" refid="tmp">
  <packagemapper from="${build}/*.class" to="*">
</pathconvert>

<!-- Execute preverify on classes. -->
<exec dir="${build}" executable="${j2me.bin}/preverify">
  <arg line="-classpath ${classpath.j2me}">
  <arg line="-d ${preverify}">
  <arg line="${unverified}">
</exec>

Maybe this will save someone else’s time.

After being convinced by a friend of mine that J2ME hacking could provide hours of fun I was determined to give it a try. My earlier attempts had only been with the basic forms, and I’d found it hard to setup a sane build environment without using Nutbeans or some other IDE.

After reading about MIDP packaging, and finding about about tools like preverify and other stuff, I finally had a nice and small development environment (vim+ant+j2me) without wasting 1GB of ram.

A couple of days earlier I had seen Opera Mini for the first time and I was surprised about its clean and good looking gui so I planned to do something similar. Now almost a week has passed and my GUI toolkit is comming along well. It looks just as good as the one Opera Mini uses, with some parts better looking, and other parts not yet implemented.

Next, the bluetooth part. When the project idea came to mind I thought any bluetooth enabled phone would do, I was wrong. Bluetooth phones predates the J2ME support for bluetooth (JSR-82). After some googling I found out that my phone lacked JSR-82, but the timing was perfect as my 24 month mobile phone contract went out this month. Some clicks later I had ordered a new mobile phone with JSR-82 (Sony Ericsson K750i). With some luck it arrives by the time the GUI toolkit is mature enough.

There are other projects that does this exact task for other music players. I’ve been looking at Bemused which has both Winamp and XMMS support. Bemused is mostly for Symbian based phones, but an outdated J2ME implementation exists. My plans are to be compatible with this protocol if it doesn’t require too much work. The protocol however lacks support for coverart, medialib browsing, so at least that has to differ. When the time comes I’ll try to contact the Bemused people to see if they’re interested in updating their protocol.

<rant>
Yesterday a large search engine was shutdown here in Sweden. The shutdown was unexpected because the website provided no illegal material, only links (in form of BitTorrent files) to both free and copyrighted material, which is legal here in Sweden. Behind the scenes are the MPAA and the US government, who convinced the Swedish government to bend our laws to fit Hollywoods likings. The police confiscated the entire server hall, which affected a large number of companies unrelated to the search engine. The whole bust is very strange and is bound to fuel some flamy debates.

It’s probably just a matter of time before they force upon us (un)intelligent design teachings in school, and of course prohibit abortion.
</rant>

But there are some brighter areas in the otherwise cold, dark reality. I finished off a GObject this afternoon that hooks up the ALSA sequencer to the Glib mainloop and fires signals when I poke my Hercules DJ Console. I’ve played a bit with a small test program that allows me to control two instances of xmms2d. Yey for play/pause syncing two playbacks of the same track!

Task left are:

• find out what is the best way to find cue points
• cache waveform preview
• bpm analysis

Some hour and a half ago I got this message on irc.

[23:06:03][juhovh] nano: fixed it
[23:06:08][juhovh] nano: it works

Yey! Finally the last piece of the puzzle has landed, well, the code must be converted to an xform plugin first, but very soon. Currently the phase vocoder uses a 45ms buffer, which is only noticable when you change the speed of the song, and for that it’s an ok latency. After the effect chain the output plugin feeds its data to the jack audio server which with the proper realtime patches has a latency of 2.9ms (according to qjackctl) on at least this computer. Pause and play happens in the output layer so the real latency is low enough for any DJ.

I’m so happy! Using XMMS2 as a DJ backend is now just a matter of writing the GUI.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been reading pvanhoof’s blog about his email reader called tinymail. I think he did the first posts about 3 million row treeview before christmas last year, and ever since I’ve been determined to get my hands dirty with the feared GtkTreeView widget.

Earlier this week, ehm last week (past midnight it seems), I started writing on what has now become a custom tree model specialized for xmms2 metadata.

GtkTreeView is a jungle. I almost gave up because of the dangerously high risk of braindamage when working with GtkTreeView, but the people at #gtk+ were helpful and about half an hour ago I finally managed to get it right.

There are still some bugs I have to take care of before letting it loose for client writers to use and abuse, but all the basics are there. It takes about 2 seconds to populate about 7500 rows of medialib ids and I think I know of a couple of places where speed could be noticeably improved. Another issue is the speed of resolving. When scrolling the list you see the entries resolve. It would be nice if the model could keep the 10 entries above and below the visible entries in memory, have to look into that later.

This is also the first project I’ve written using gob2, The GObject Builder, which is an object oriented language around C which you compile to regular C-sources later. It has been such a delight to use gob2. You don’t have to edit header files as you change your API, all the boilerplate code gets generated and you have nice macros for dealing with the common stuff. It also gives a much clearer view of the code. Another plus is that it’s possible to generate C++ code too. Gob2 is definatly the tool to use when writing GObjects.

The dynamic loading tree view model is also a part of my grand plans for a DJ application which I now think about writing in C++ using gtkmm as GUI toolkit. Andreas emailed me his phase vocoder some days ago and juhovh has been working on integrating it into xmms2, and nailing the last bugs. With the phase vocoder in xmms2, the last piece is in place and using xmms2 as a DJ backend is suddenly not so far away. The Hercules DJ Console works like a charm these days and I’ve been hacking on some alsa sequencer glib mainloop integration lately. When that has been accomplished it’s just loads and loads of gui code to write, but with just one week left of school and 3 months of nothingness ahead of me, it might just happen.