(yes, another muine/tech post, to my non-tech fans (i know you exist, all 2 of you), i apologize)
So for those that missed it, I released Muine 0.8.4 last sunday. 0.8.4 was mainly a bugfix of the 0.8.3, plus a few new things like a working Inotify plugin from Snorp and better album cover art fetching via MusicBrainz. Excepting my double post to gnome-announce-list, things seemed to go off without a hitch. In the process, we announced the new website found at http://www.muine-player.org/. It’s all sorts of MediaWiki powered, and looks pretty d*mn good, if I do say so myself (no thanks to me, the design work was mostly tseng (of fame) and floam from #muine on gimpnet).
So, let’s look forward now to fun new stuff. In my last post, I talked about things I wanted to work on in the future…. well I’m gonna “live in the now!” (to quote an awesome movie) and talk about things I’ve been hacking on the past couple of weeks. DISCLAIMER: NONE OF THIS IS IN CVS YET, AND NO YOU CAN’T HAVE A PATCH TO TEST.
First, gnome-vfs support. This is something people are constantly asking for, as lots of folks have music hosted on either samba or sftp/ssh shares they want to play, without copying locally. Just last night at about… 1:30AM I got my first music playback working over an sftp gnome-vfs share, complete with metadata importing, etc, etc. By no means is it complete, and I’ve still got some fundamental issues to work out with it, but things are progressing. In the progress, I’ve had to learn a lot of gstreamer foo, including such great things as “decodebin. The work included drawing such great diagrams to help me understand things as this one:
which generally leaves me feeling like this:
As a result, all of muine’s DB stuff has had to be changed to use a URI paradigm instead of a regular file path, the inotify plugin had to be updated accordingly, etc, etc, etc. All in all I’m happy with how it’s progressing.
Second up, is Jorn’s Group’s Proposal. This one is going to have a *huge* impact on what can be done with Muine. I’m talking iPod/iRiver/iWhatever support via a special “Pete’s iPod” group created for all the songs on one’s ipod when it is plugged in; I’m talking DAAP support where each DAAP share, and each playlist from that DAAP share can be a separate group; I’m talking playlist filling from a set of groups; I’m talking… *yeeeeaaaaaah*. You hopefully get the idea. It’s a great idea from Jorn that I think will fit well with the current muine usage model. Anyways, here’s a screenshot teaser of what I have “done” so far:
This is showing off the addition of the “search [____________] in [Group Combo]” in the Add Song/Album dialogs, which will allow the search to happen only in a specified group, as well as the groups editor. The editor is currently actually showing a read-only “Smart Group”. Smart groups are cool, as they allow arbitrary logic for deciding what songs/albums belong in the group, so one can easily have a “short songs group”, as shown here, of songs less than 30 seconds long, or more complex things like “Punk songs from 1990-1995″. By default I think this functionality will only be used for a small set of smart groups, like “Unplayed songs”, and “Recently played songs/albums”, but I hope that a more advanced smart group editor/creator could be created as a plugin.
Note the icon next to the short songs combo box entry, this isn’t definite, but I think i want groups/group types to allow setting an icon to represent them, this cheesy gear representing it as a “smart group”, and one might have the network icon for DAAP shares, etc. This will hopefully allow us to not have to add seperators/bogus category itesm in the group combo box, as the items’ type will be self described by the small icon.
Anyways, both of the above things are far from being complete, but I wanted to try to give some insight into what I’ve been hacking on, and maybe start generating a little bit more of the “Muine Buzz” that existed back in the day.
COOL STUFF, I SWEAR.
(In completely unrelated news, I got Indian food with Jackson tonight, and man, it was good to finally have Indian after not supping on such tasting things as samosas in *months*)
