Andrew Luecke's dashboard

First, I should say that I'm not hired by POTI, and are part of the community (not even a developer, I just talk a lot).

The problem with iPod scrobbling, I'd imagine is that:
1) There will be no legal way to support it in the future (thank you DMCA). Yes, at the moment a lot of people are still using old iPods, but the new ones apparently have been modified in a way that cannot be reverse engineered legally.
2) POTI could never support the iPod's as well as iTunes. Features like application's require ITMS access, something Songbird could not provide.
3) Apple often upgrades some iPod's, breaking backwards compatibility. With the iPhone and iPod touches, expect it to happen more often. This means that support could break at any time.
4) Finally, Apple play's cat and mouse (palm pre for example). Apple's only choice is to either lock down the iPod protocol more in the future (making support near impossible, or extremely expensive), or open up the iPod's completely, so that they can be supported by any player (to allow them to be competitive, but would be unlikely). Either way, working on full-on iPod support now I believe would be a waste of money. That brings me to 5.
5) Development isn't free, and since Apple is consistently protecting the iPod's, even assuming the DMCA didn't exist, it would suck development resources every new release. Why support one brand of players when companies are out there such as Google, Phillips, Nokia, Sansa and others are all making it easy to support them? Instead of spending the time constantly reverse engineering Apple's protocols and supporting only half of their functionality, POTI could instead support MANY other brands instead (reliably support their feature set and protocol). In fact, Songbird could quite easily become the preferred player for many brands of portable media players/Smart Phones.

So that's why, in my opinion, I'd like to see this, but as a community addon primarily. I wouldn't like to see the Pioneers of the Inevitable take away resources from features such as Video functionality that would allow portable video players from being supported reliably, for a brand of media player which is mostly unsupportable. .

I never managed to get it compiling in VS9 either :( Only in linux.

Would be nice if there was a semi unofficial guide to do so... And In windows 7, the vista sdk doesn't install either (although, the windows 7 one should be available now to fix that prob)

Awesome.. this should go birdbath – Andrew Luecke, on November 07, 2009 06:51

But if every 3rd party company who wants to release a build of Songbird, needs to request permission from the Monkey audio guys, to me, it may put off developers. Also, no player which I am aware of includes Monkey support by default (so there must be a good reason which we have missed).

But I had an idea to be able to automatically install codecs. This way users wouldn't be that inconvenianced, because any attempt to import an APE would pop up that it needs the ape plugin and offer to install it. So this would mean its as easy as it would be if in core.

In terms of an official APE plugin, not really sure (for me, it wouldn't be a priority), but codec coding contests I think would probably yield a APE plugin as one of the first results. I can only speak for myself, but I'd prefer shared collections first, but that's me.. No idea whats best for the community though (I don't have enough knowledge about how popular APE is). – Andrew Luecke, on November 07, 2009 06:30

I've been working on this on and off since April. For the foreseeable future, it will be "off", so I'm going to go ahead and release what I've got in case it never gets back to "on". I'm releasing it LGPL so anyone can work on it. (One of my biggest pet peeves is code that gets abandoned without being released, ready or not).

The plugin is capable of playing Songbird output in WASAPI exclusive mode. I have only tested it with Songbird 1.2 on Win 7 Beta/RC with mp3 files at 44.1kHz and 48kHz.

It is buggy and unfinished. If you use it you may notice poor performance resulting in occasional popping, It may crash. If you try to play a file that your sound card is not capable of playing directly (e.g. sample rate higher than your soundcard supports) it will probably hang. Feel free to test it and give feedback, but do so at your own risk. Feel freer to look at the code and finish it.

A 7z archive with the plugin .dll and source are here.

di7ra.

If you read the licence, it means anyone who rebrands Songbird would need to write for permission to the author.
2) It may possibly not work well with the MPL.

But it could be done via external plugin, but I think it wouldn't be a good idea to include it into core honestly by default. – Andrew Luecke, on November 07, 2009 02:32

I'm not hired by POTI, or a developer, but I'd assume they are prioritising other things first. DBUS support is something that could easily be added by extension actually. I'd like to see it too, but I guess it makes more sense to prioritise stuff such as better device support first..

What about using Autopackage instead though? Then all distro's with bash support can run the installer, and it doesn't need to be repackaged 10 times.

Ubuntu might be popular, but gentoo, arch, Redhat/fedora, Suse are too. An auto-package could possibly accommodate ALL these distro's, and it makes it easier for users (because they don't even need to know which distro they are running) – Andrew Luecke, on November 06, 2009 15:31

To be honest, I personally would prefer all 3rd party developers refrain from releasing custom linux packages (deb, ebuilds, etc), until Linux distributions agree to support a common format.

Technically, though, I think there should be an official RPM package, because RPM is the format defined in the Linux Standard Base, as the common package format

Which program are you using to rip them? – Andrew Luecke, on November 06, 2009 06:40

G'day,

By the way, are they files you ripped yourself? Sometimes people do silly stuff like rename m4a files into mp3. Unlikely though.

Led is expected in February. I can confirm that it seems a fix has been added to the repo (I haven't personally tested it though).

However, like any good software, 1.5/Led will be released when its ready. 1.4 is just around the corner though (or should be)

G'day,

Just wondering:
1) are you using 64bit? For 64bit, you need to erase a few extra entries in the registry
2) Did you ever use 1.3.x-1.5.x? 1.2.x shouldn't have any uninstall problems.
3) Finally, have you tried also physically deleting the directory?

Yeah.. as mentioned, I have no real interest in spending exorbitant amounts of money on audio equipment anymore . I only ran a test for WASAPI, and on my current set of speakers/soundcard, during frequency changes I get a weird annoying noise (with no sound improvement).

Used to own a good sound-card, but I sold it and spent the money on flying instead (which I found was a MUCH better fulfilling use of the money). The $500 speakers are good enough for me, and I doubt my experience will be enhanced with $3000 speakers.

Because to me, the music and immersion of the songs I listen to mainly defines the experience (I keep dolby ProLogic 2 enabled so I can use my 5 speakers, instead of only 2, despite a reduction in quality).

If I need reference quality audio, there are concerts here all the time I could attend. I guess another thing I am trying to ask, is people need to ask themselves what defines their experience, is it marginally better sound quality, or other things. For me, I need good enough sound quality, but $2500 would buy me a LOT of great CD's, which would impact my experience more – Andrew Luecke, on November 04, 2009 05:50

Some watch folders though such as SMB drives need manual updating, because the Watch Folder api can't work on them.

same here... It seems to be broken...

G'day,
This should work if you use the 1.4 beta's. In 1.2, it was disabled.. – Andrew Luecke, on November 03, 2009 08:10