Noatun Upgrade

[Stefan Gehn]

Am Montag, 31. Januar 2005 17:34 schrieb Yogesh  Marwaha:
> Hi!
>
> I am a big fan of Noatun. I am using it right from the day when I

Nice to hear. That again proves that artsd does work on some systems (granted, 
it does not work on all) ;)

> first used Linux. What I liked was it simplicity and extensibility
> (plugins). But, now its future is unpredictable. Major factor for this
> is that there has not been any improvement/addition of feature
> recently.

You are just uninformed, that's all. There's a branch called "make-it-snow" 
which me and Charles are currently working on. It's meant to become Noatun 3 
which will hopefully ship with KDE 4.

>
> I strongly feel that Noatun now needs a major facelifting. For that I
> have a few hints:
> 1.	Make its engine also a plugin

Planned, will work on that starting with next week, this week I still have 
exams at uni.

> 2.	Some neat features like cross-fade etc.

Not planned by myself for any particular engine-plugin. It will be up to the 
engine-plugin, handling it outside of the plugin is hardly possible anyway. 
Btw, this might be easy to do with an aKode backend which has got a builtin 
crossfader.

> 3.	Somehow manage to play audio cds directly.

This is up to kdelibs and kio and/or depending on what the backend can do. For 
artsd we would need either an arts-plugin or a kio that supports seeking.
As my own experience with on-the-fly realtime digital audio extraction is 
pretty much disappointing I'm not going to waste any time of this (read: it's 
just not possible to get this working reliable with any cdrom I have ever had 
in my computer, not even using windows apps that claim to do this properly).

> Otherwise I do not see any major lack of feature in Noatun. I don't
> know if someone is already working on any of the above said, but would
> like to hear from you what you think of my ideas and if I am wasting
> my time writing plugins for Noatun (In case it is scheduled to be
> dropped from KDE).

Just watch make-it-snow branch. Right now its API is a huge moving target so 
starting to write plugins for it would be a waste of time. I'll make an 
announcement as soon as the API starts stabilizing, I don't have any 
timeframe for that though.

Btw, don't hesitate to contact either me (mETz) or Charles (njaard) on 
irc.freenode.net in #kde-devel. I hope to be there more often starting next 
week.

Bye, Stefan aka mETz