JeCh's dashboard

Hi Mike,

is there any progress in the documentation for creating GStreamer plugins?

Hi Laura,

that's strange. I never installed the QuickTime addon (or QuickTime itself), I don't need it. It is not installed now in my current 0.7 version. Also as I already wrote, I deleted my whole profile, so any addons should be gone anyway.

I now tried to upgrade to 1.0 RC1 and the crash is back again.

Unfortunately RC1 crashes too with the same behavior. The crash report is here.

If you need any help with tracking this problem, let me know.

@mlp
Well Songbird is IMO mainly useful if you want to listen to music through your computer. It's the most comfortable way. You can quickly find the music you want to listen to, you can easily create playlists etc.

Of course you should have good speakers attached to you computer. Active speakers like these for example can do a pretty good job (nothing for an audiophile, of course) and cost only $50. And the setup is as easy as possible, just plug and play.

Btw. if you have any questions regarding EAC and lame, look at HydrogenAudio. There is a lot of useful information and they have a nice discussion forum too.

No. I'm just an addon developer and enthusiast. :-) I'm not related to the company in any way.

So to answer some of the questions and comments here:

1) Why would anyone of you want to use WMP or iTunes for ripping CDs? There are plenty much better and not over bloated rippers. Many of theme were already mentioned in this discussion. By using a standalone ripper, you'll get full control over the ripping process.

2) If you want the highest quality, there are formats which can offer it. Have you ever heard about flac? It's lossless so it has the equal quality as original recording. But even on good amplifier and speakers, most people (over 90%) won't recognize an MP3 at ~128 kbps (VBR) from original. Of course such MP3 must be created by high quality standalone ripper, not by WMP or iTunes. For a portable player, where you usually hear a lot of surrounding noise and it's sound quality is mostly not very high, it's absolutely sufficient. If you need higher quality, increase bitrate or choose better formats such as Ogg Vorbis or flac.

3) If you wnat to play CDs, then Songbird isn't for you. It is designed to manage large music collection on hard drives and on Internet. To play CDs use any simple CD player, there are hundreds of them. You don't need the features Songbird offers if you only want to play CDs. But I suggest you to rip the CDs to HDD, because it is much more reliable and comfortable. You'll find the song you want to play in seconds. You don't have to search and switch CDs. HDDs are quite cheap today and if you want the same quality that CD offers, choose a lossless format (such as flac or WavPack).

4) If you won to burn music CDs, there are plenty burners which can do it for you. And again you'll get much better results compared to WMP or iTunes.

Now some comments to EAC:
a) It's configuration is quite simple and automatic today. You'll only need to get lame.exe from here.
b) You can choose between speed and quality. It's up to you. If you have good CD-ROM, the speed is good.
c) You don't have have to reinstall most programs after reinstalling Windows. Certainly not EAC or CDex. Only poorly designed programs or the ones that needs to be hooked into the system (DS filters, firewall, antivirus etc.) must be reinstalled.

So let me ask this: Why the hell don't you use EAC for ripping? You won't find a better ripper, everything will be tagged correctly and your files won't vanish. Not to mention that the MP3s will have much higher quality since EAC uses lame.

If you want to batch tag your music, why don't you use mp3tag? You hardly find anything better.

And if you want to organize, search and filter your music collection, then use Songbird. With the switch to GStreamer, Songbird will be able to offer high quality sound too. So it will be the ultimate player. Not ripper, not burner, not tagger, not image editor or spreadsheet calculator. It will be the best music player and organizer.

Why don't you blame Microsoft because their image editing in Word sucks? You will probably use Photoshop or Gimp to edit you images and then paste them in Word. Wouldn't you?

There is one thing I don't understand. Why people who are still using obsolete CDs (I haven't ripped or burned a single CD for months) are looking for a player like Songbird? Songbird is strong in filters, dynamic playlists and music organizing. This only useful for a huge collection of media files stored on harddrive.

If I only play CDs, I don't need any player with music database. Also how difficult is to start ImgBurn, CDBurnerXP, InfraRecorder or other free burning application and burn the CD I want? It is not any harder then using a SB addon would be.

Anyway if someone decides to make an addon, I suggest to use cdrtools. It is a set of multiplatform commandline tools to rip and burn CDs/DVDs/BDs. So all you have to do is create a GUI and integrate it with Songbird. It won't be easy, but the more difficult part is already done.

AAC is as much proprietary as MP3. Both are ISO standards from MPEG. MP3 is MPEG-1, AAC is MPEG-4. Apple has nothing to do with AAC except that they use it in iPod and iTunes. But they didn't develop AAC, they only screwed up MP4 with DRM. There is an opensource AAC+ decoder called ffad2 and even a free (fro home use) encoder from Nero, which works in Windows and Linux.

The problem with both MP3 and AAC is that they're patented. In some countries you have to pay if you want to distribute a SW or HW which supports MP3 and AAC. The only patent-free solution is Ogg Vorbis. – JeCh, on October 25, 2008 05:14

Right, I don't have QuickTime and I won't install it. It is useless for me and it spreads everywhere and causes many problems. It is kind of SW I'm trying to stay away as far as possible. I don't have any music in MP4/AAC anyway, I just tried it out of curiosity.

So I would be interested in native GStreamer decoders. I think I know one person who might be able to host the plugins with problematic licensing. I'll try to ask him and if you write a guide I might be able to create the addons. I have some programming knowledge.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your answer. I know that when using nightly builds there might be a lot of problems which get fixed. I mainly wanted to point out that switching to GStreamer will bring a lot of problems on Windows and I wanted to let you know about them. I think GStreamer is a very good framework and it is right choice to use it. But making it work perfectly on Windows will be very difficult, I'm afraid.

Would it be possible to somehow support anything which can be decoded by DirectShow? That would be one good option. I think Elisa is working like this.

But the best solution of course would be native GST plugins. What would it take to create such addon? From what I know about GStreamer, it should be enough to copy the correct .dll to plugins directory. Am I right? How difficult would it be create such addon.

Btw. I tried to play an MP4/AAC and it didn't work. There is no MP4 demuxer and no AAC decoder in gst-plugins directory.

That's strange. I use ffdshow as my default audio/video decoder. If I play an MP3 in WMP, ffdshow is used. I don't have Songbird blacklisted as Matt Wood shows it.

Now when I play a song in Songbird, ffdshow is not used (I would see it's icon in tray). Is it possible to find out what backend is used to play the current file? If it is DirectShow, is it possible to find out what filters are used? If I could use ffdshow, it would be a nice workaround for many missing features since ffdshow contains a dynamic compressor (AKA normalizer), equalizer and many other DSPs.

I'm using Songbird nightly for October 8th.

Btw. the playback is very choppy in all 0.8pre I tried if any other application or Songbird itself is using a lot of CPU. The playback should be running with higher priority then other processes.

Using one program for all or many separate programs is about priorities. For me it is no obstruction to start a new program to do what I want. Even for ripping there are many things that for example EAC can do a most other rippers can't. EAC reads C2 errors and verifies the results over internet, so you can be sure you ripped the CD correctly. It also offers you very detailed options for tags, naming scheme and encoder options. You can rip CD as one file with CUE sheet. There are not much other rippers which can do this. These are just some of the most important features, there are also many other options that some people will miss.

And I don't see any problem to click on EAC's icon to start it if I want to rip a CD. I think it is much easier then to search for ripping feature in media players.

So yes, make a Songbird ripping addon for those who want it. But don't make it a core feature. – JeCh, on September 23, 2008 09:30

What's wrong on using one program for ripping, another one for playing and managing and third one for burning if each of them can do it's part best? This is the way I prefer. I probably could have web, IM, torrent, email, picture viewer etc. in one application. I prefer to have a browser, separate torrent, IM and email clients, picture viewer etc. I don't see any drawbacks in using many softwares, but I see a lot advantages.

Of course there must be feature in Songbird, which scans music directory for new files, but this is planned for next version AFAIK. – JeCh, on September 21, 2008 17:22

Songbird is a media player. CD ripping is certainly not a core feature for any media player. I use foobar2000 and Winamp as media players, but I never used their CD ripping feature. There are many rippers which can do it much better. Let's name EAC or CDex for Windows, there is Sound Juicer or Grip for Linux and Max for OS X (I never used it, but looks nice). I don't like all-in-one softwares. They usually do everything but they're limited in all the features.

Thanks, this answers it. I'm just wondering, is it enough to copy the plugins (DLL files) to the GStreamer directory in Songbird?

Hi Mike,

I find your answer quite confuding. If I understand things correctly, the addon is a GStreamer wrapper to DirectShow. So it should play anything supported by DirectShow (= plays in WMP). So to support AAC, you need an MP4 splitter (if the file is MP4) or AAC Parser (if it is raw AAC stream) and of course an AAC decoder like ffdshow.

Most people try Songbird because they dislike iTunes and QuickTime. So installing QuickTime is no oprtion for most users.

The other confusion comes from the fact that GStreamer has it's plugins tu support nearly all common media formats (including AAC). What's wrong with these plugins? Why don't you use them and suggest a DirectShow wrapper instead?

Also I think that AAC is as much free as MP3. Both formats are restricted by patent law in many countries. That's the reason why they are in the "bad" and "ugly" GStreamer plugins. But it should be possible to create an addon which includes them. In fact almost all Linux distributions allow you to install them. So there must a be a legal way to do it.