KAudioCreator

[Benjamin Meyer]

  I am the author of KAudioCreator.  I recently moved to a new state, started 
a new job (Ever heard of the Zaurus :-) and am getting married this weekend 
so you can probably guess that I haven't had time to read the list and I 
simply posted a move request to the list here a little while ago not 
expecting any objection:

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=101923691909626&w=2

  Little did I know about the debate that was raging.  As for my opinion I 
agree very much that the the CD burning software tools should be consolidated 
into one simple clean application to burn cd's.
  It only took me 2 weeks to write KAudioCreator.  This was with testing by 
myself on several hundred Cd's, user interface testing (How many apps can you 
say have actually had user interface testing?) by a number of people, 
debugging etc.  KAudioCreator is not much more then a frontend to a number of 
other tools include the audiocd:// ioslave (I am reusing code and not 
duplicating I should point out), encoders and rippers.  In face I was working 
together with Rik (audiocd io slave developer) to develop a cddb library to 
even further share code between my app, audiocd:// the CD player and all of 
the CD applications.  (This was slowed to my real life getting in the way as 
stated above)

  What is the point of a CD burner application?  It is to burn audio and data 
Cd's.  Some can do more, some can do less.  
  What is the point of a CD ripper application?  It is to rip audio from a CD 
and encode it into an audio format. (be it wav, mp3 or something else).
  What do these two have in common?  Other then accessing a CD drive and 
using cddb not much.  And in both of those cases (CD accessing and cddb) a 
library was/is being developed to reduce overhead.

For those who have used KAudioCreator know what it does and appreciate what 
it does (I get many thank you letters).  For those that do not know or have 
never actually used it you can go to the webpage here:
http://www.csh.rit.edu/~benjamin/desktop/programs/kaudiocreator/
or see pretty screenshots here:
http://www.csh.rit.edu/~benjamin/desktop/programs/kaudiocreator/screenshots.html

KAudioCreator fills a need that audio rippers users want from a kde 
application.  audiocd:// will encode on the fly, but doesn't give you any 
flexability or control over it.  KAudioCreator extends the ioslave to give 
you job control (i.e. rip 30 Cd's before going to bed with your 150X CD drive 
and then let the job control encode them all night).  It allows you to set 
the encoder up exactly as you would like (want to test out that new lame 
option? sure!), and edit the audio tags for all of the songs.  KAudioCreator 
does all of this and more in a very clean and simply user interface.  Moving 
a tool like this into a CD burner would make users wonder why in the would it 
is there.

As far as the cdburner applications are concerned yes they need to 
consolidate into 1 working app (None of them work on my SCSI 2x 7 year old 
nothing special about it CD burner for the record, but the Gnome one does 
annoyingly enough), but as far as CD ripper application as concerned we did 
consolidate.  audiocd:// is the lower level for KAudioCreator and work is 
being done to further reduce the one overlap between these two (cddb).

Someone mentioned that the burners can rip or something like that.  If that 
is true then I would really have to request that the name of the app is 
either changed to "CdTool" or much more appropriate the ripping aspect of the 
application is removed.  I would much rather prefer having a rock solid 1.0 
simple CD burning application then a every feature under the sun kinda works 
application.  Burning a bad CD costs me $$$ (although not as much as back in 
the day when they were $10 per disk, but still it is a bad taste in my 
mouth).  A Cd burning application should burn the CD in a clean, simple way.  
Why do you think windows people still pirate EasyCDCreator 3.00b, because it 
just works and doesn't try to be the end all of cd utilities. 

Although Cd burning and Cd ripping are similar (At a _very_ base level) I do 
not feel that incorporating KAudioCreator into a Cd Burning application is 
justified at all.  Just think of the confusion when the cd burning 
application is required to make mp3's.

KAudioCreator concentrates one one aspect of Cd's, ripping  Cd burning 
applications should concentrate on the burning aspect.  They are very 
different aspects and should be kept separated.  KAudioCreator gives the user 
flexability without overwhelming the user and is ready for release today and 
so I ask again that KAudioCreator and the audiocd:// ioslave be moved into 
kdemultimedia so that we can continue development on the common cddb library 
(the CD player is already in there so it doesn't need to be moved).

-Benjamin Meyer

P.S. I expect to get back to development in June after the honeymoon.

P.P.S I am not signed to the kde-core-devel list right now so please reply to 
all so I can get the responses.