CDDA support in Noatun

[Stuart Longland]

Hi All,
	I'll start from the beginning here.  (Those wishing to skip the
background information, see *My Query* below)  I'm loosely connected
with a scottish dance group[1], this is an ammeture group operating out
of Brisbane.  For the dance music, often it is too fast for most people
(particularly newbies) to dance to, and therefore we are looking at some
mechanism for adjusting the speed of playback.

	Up until recently, we've been using a tape deck which was modified with
a speed adjustment.  This has been working fine, however the unit is now
getting quite old in the tooth and is starting to develop an appetite.
More importantly, a replacement unit is becomming prohibitively
expensive.  The technology is also starting to become rather outdated
very quickly, and therefore we'd like to move to CD.

	The solution we've come up with, is to use an old laptop[2] with an
internal CD-ROM drive hooked into external speakers, to replace this old
PA system setup.  What we're looking for, is a simple-to-use
application, which can read a track from the CD, and play it in
real-time allowing the playback to be sped-up or slowed down (roughly
between 80% and 110% speed).

	Originally, the plan was to develop one from scratch, however just
recently, it came to my attention that Noatun was already capable of
playing MP3s at an adjusted speed (using the Alsaplayer interface).
Seeing as this is already an easy-to-use and mature platform already, it
seemed obvious to me that this would be a better solution than bashing
out my own.

	The target users aren't particularly computer savvy.  Most likely
they'd like to be able to put in a CD, click a button, select a track
then hit play, and have it, Just Work.  Most of them are semi-familiar
with Windows.  For basic tasks, that is, booting up, starting the
package, and shutting down -- I don't think Linux will be that difficult
to handle, provided everything is layed out in a consistent, easily
understood manner.

*My Query*

	Is there a preferred way to develop input plugins?  Ideally, I'd like
to make an input plugin that can say, take a URL of the form:
cdda:/dev/cdrom:2 (or similar), meaning play Track 2 from /dev/cdrom.
I've just poked through the documentation, it covers making Interfaces,
Visualisation and Effect plugins, but I don't see much talking about
input plugins.  What would be the best way to tackle this?  (Note, I'll
be doing a crash course in C++ in the process)

	From here, my plan would be to modify the AlsaPlayer interface to add a
Scan CD button, and to make the speed adjustment endpoints configurable
(so the scale is more useful).

(BTW: Is there an IRC channel I can join to discuss this on?)
Any assistance would be appreciated.
Reguards,
-- 
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Stuart Longland -oOo- http://stuartl.longlandclan.hopto.org |
| Atomic Linux Project     -oOo-    http://atomicl.berlios.de |
| - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
| I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
1. Clan MacKenzie Association to be exact.
2. I have a Toshiba Sattelite 2250CT (Celeron 366MHz, 128MB RAM, 30GB
HDD) with Gentoo Linux lined up already.