KAudioCreator

[alexpod]

Hi,

On Monday 06 May 2002 11:27, Benjamin Meyer wrote:
>  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).

Do not mean to rain on your parade, but I could show a few dozens of the
'Thank you' letters as well ( I'm sure same same is true for the other
'toasters'), but all I understand from those is the poor state of CD creation
business on Linux - users are happy to see anything with more or less
friendly UI.


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.

CD burner app will not be complete without those features. In my case, I
 tried to stick to data only. But I'm(was) getting user requests and
 complains that audio part is really necessary.

>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),

I was never able to get Lame working on my machine at home, does that mean
that audiocd:// is to blame that I cannot create MP3s?

 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.

Just think of the confusion when the cd burning application can not make
 mp3's or create audio CDs from those. AFAIK EasyCDCreator supports it now.

>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).

That's exactly how I understand the idea of the forthcomming CD burning app,
where different parts of the process are kept separated, but still share same
base, and same tiing app, which indirectly manages those parts. Being
independent module is very close to being a stand alone application, but the
code could be reused by some other modules and look-and-feel remains
consistent.

Copiing Audio CD involves a lot of the same functionality as found in
KAudioCreator (displaing tracks info for example). So the points raised in
the app duplication thread are valid for this case as well IMHO.

>-Benjamin Meyer

Just an opinion;
Alex (cdbakeoven developer).