Re: [gnomoradio-devel] Anyone out there? Ideas on collaborative music soft

[Dave Fancella]

On Friday 06 May 2005 02:21 am, Jim Garrison wrote:
> In the coming weeks we will be developing a new version of Gnomoradio
> based on mozilla.  To play sound, it will use gstreamer, which will

Ouch.  I kinda wish you'd mentioned this before.  Mozilla's a wonderful 
platform, but it can be a real pain.  I found wxPython much simpler, and what 
I've been reading about pyQt is definitely convincing me to switch to that 
when Qt 4 comes out GPL for Windows.  Python's core libraries have all the 
xml/http stuff you could ever want, and there are rdf libraries available (I 
think there's one in the core library, but don't quote me on it).  GUI is 
simpler than taking off your underwear with either wxGlade or the fancy Qt 
tool (I forget what it's called).  All that's hard is putting in a player, 
but that's a problem I've solved and would be happy to help you guys solve it 
if you chose python.  In fact, you could take my pluginmanager and the 
plugins and drop them right in and have the media player already (provided 
you have one of several different libraries, pygame, pymad, or pyaudiere).

Anyway, you guys will do what you want, of course.  :)

> hopefully work on all platforms (and if it does not, we will simply
> write xpcom components for those platforms that it does not work with,
> using other audio ouput layers).  I've been hesitant to announce this

I'd suggest, if you don't mind, using Mozilla's built-in system for playing 
media files to start.  That way it'll use whatever the user has installed.  
On Linux, that's whatever (I think it's Kaffeine on my new system).  In 
Windows it'll usually be WMP.  You can bundle the ogg codec for WMP with 
gnomoradio to solve that problem.  :)

Anyway, writing XPCOM components is damn near rocket science if you need C++ 
extensions.  I'd highly recommend you stear clear of writing a media player 
and just use whatever the user's preferred player is, but if you have to 
write one, PortAudio is an excellent cross-platform library for playing.  
combine it with libsndfile and you can play every file under the sun except 
for ogg vorbis and mp3, but you're probably already familiar with libMAD and 
libvorbis enough to know they're cross-platform as well.  :)  (aside: 
libsndfile was supposed to pick up ogg vorbis support, but I don't know yet 
if it has.  Another option is to check out libmezzo from the Audacity 
project.  It's still in development and hasn't gotten a stable release, but 
it'll have all the primitives you need to build a media player)

And I realise you just said that you've just spent months learning all of 
this.  I spent months learning about Mozilla only to discover I hadn't even 
scratched the surface and was still several months out from prototyping my 
application.  It was soon after that that I made the switch to wxPython.

> In short, Gnomoradio is far from dead.

Well good luck, and keep in mind that too many changes of direction can be 
harmful to your health.  :)

Dave


> Jim
>
> On Thu, 2005-05-05 at 23:49 -0300, Alexandre Van de Sande wrote:
> > Hello, is there anyone out there in this list?
> >
> > Gnomoradio is a bit silenced, just wanted to know if anyone still
> > receives emails...
> >
> > Well if anyone does, just wanted to let you know that we built a site
> > around some ideas based on the gnomoradio philosophy.
> >
> > www.wanderingabout.com/FreeMusic
> >
> >
> > just to let you know. Thanks.
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnomoradio-devel
>
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