Mike Smith's dashboard

Mike Smith replied on November 11, 2009 18:21 to the question "What digital music formats will Songbird play?" in Songbird:

For those of you looking for APE support: we can't commit to providing this in the core product, sorry. However, we understand that some of you have a large collection of APE files, and that converting them to FLAC would be difficult/annoying - that's why we're encouraging our community to write addons to add support for additional formats.

Many of our windows users have been asking for WASAPI (an advanced audio playback API for Windows Vista) support - we haven't been able to do that either (too many things to do, not enough time!), but a terrific community member stepped up and wrote an addon to use WASAPI - if someone wanted to do that for APE support too, that'd be absolutely fantastic!

We're not trying to discourage people from using Songbird - so please stick around - just noting the reality that we can't do everything. That's exactly why we're trying to get our community to attack problems like this that we don't have time or resources for.

Mike

Mike Smith replied on November 11, 2009 18:16 to the idea "WASAPI output" in Songbird:

Mike M - awesome, thanks for doing this!

Are you willing to release the source for this? If you could attach a patch to GStreamer's bugzilla (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/) lots of other people could make use of this.

Mike

Mike Smith replied on November 10, 2009 18:44 to the problem "iPod sync broken, 'transcoder not available' but transcoder should not be needed" in Songbird:

The problem here is that with the new support for transcoding files for devices, each device needs to describe what formats it can support - and code for this hasn't been added to the ipod addon.

There's a default implementation that just says that the device can support MP3 files - but there's probably nothing in the ipod code creating that default object.

I think changing the CapabilitiesConnect() method in the ipod device to call RegisterDeviceCapabilities(mCapabilities); before the call to mCapabilities->InitDone() might be enough to have this work.

A better solution would be to implement a new capabilities registrar for the ipod that describes the additional formats (like AAC) that the ipod can play.

Mike

Mike Smith replied on October 19, 2009 19:54 to the question "What digital music formats will Songbird play?" in Songbird:

klint: ah, I bet I know why! Please file a bug, should be an easy one to fix. Thanks!

Mike Smith replied on October 19, 2009 17:14 to the question "Building Gstreamer + Codecs?" in Songbird:

Mike M's answer is pretty good - we don't have an official build system that uses mingw, so if you choose to pursue that path, you're going to be pretty much on your own - sorry.

If you run into specific problems I'll try to help - but general "how to build the tree with a non-standard toolchain" issues are a bit too time-consuming for me to figure out - I don't use your toolchain either, so I'd probably run into the same issues.

Mike

Mike Smith replied on October 19, 2009 17:14 to the question "What digital music formats will Songbird play?" in Songbird:

klint: I think MP2 should already work, at least on windows (and maybe linux?) - I haven't tried though.

Adding support for playback of a format through gstreamer will allow transcoding to happen from that format too, yes.

If you add support via a different media core (e.g. our WMA DRM support goes through the Windows Media Player addon, not gstreamer) does _not_ add support for transcoding from that format, though. That's why we strongly encourage adding new gstreamer plugins.

Mike

Mike Smith replied on October 12, 2009 17:00 to the question "Can Songbird play WMA formats??" in Songbird:

Actually, WMA is supported on windows without any addons.

If you have DRM WMA files, you need the Windows Media Player addon, though.

Mike Smith replied on October 12, 2009 16:59 to the question "What digital music formats will Songbird play?" in Songbird:

nicault: this thread is a pretty clear request! So, anyone from our community want to step up?

Mike Smith replied on October 08, 2009 17:02 to the question "What digital music formats will Songbird play?" in Songbird:

di7ra: Sorry - we have lots of things that are keeping us really busy here in the nest. APE support just isn't a high priority. There are lots of other formats we don't support either - that's why one of the things we _did_ do was make sure that it was easy to write an addon to add support for additional formats.

So we're encouraging our community to do that - and we hope someone does. APE support in an addon would be cool!

Mike

Mike Smith replied on October 06, 2009 05:28 to the idea "On demand encoding?" in Songbird:

Andrew: we would not condone that officially, of course.

However, if the user installs any addon that provides an mp3 encoder as a gstreamer plugin, it'll automatically be available for transcoding to use. People in jurisdictions where there are no active mp3 patents should do that!

Mike

Mike Smith replied on October 05, 2009 21:28 to the idea "On demand encoding?" in Songbird:

ethanjim: no, that's for the mp3 encoder that we have (for partners that want to license it - or maybe we'll have it available for sale at some point in the future?). That's just for the license on the actual code - the patent licensing (which is the super-expensive bit) there's no way to avoid.

There's no way we're going to have free mp3 encoding any time soon, sorry!

Mike Smith replied on October 05, 2009 21:01 to the idea "On demand encoding?" in Songbird:

Sure, that would be possible. It'd be a great addon for someone to write!

Note though that Songbird will NOT include an mp3 encoder - the license fees for including MP3 encoding support are too high (we would have to pay several dollars for each free copy of songbird that users downloaded!)

Mike Smith replied on October 05, 2009 17:29 to the problem "Songbird fails to start on some Linux systems due to gstreamer-python" in Songbird:

Wes: I don't think we'll be able to get it fixed in 1.4. It's actually a bug in gst-python, not in songbird - it's possible to work around, but I don't think we'll have time to get a proper workaround in place.

Justin: gst-python loads some shared libraries with the RTLD_LAZY flag. It shouldn't be doing that. This environment variable overrides that to make the dynamic linker ignore RTLD_LAZY.

Mike Smith replied on September 28, 2009 23:35 to the problem "Songbird fails to start on some Linux systems due to gstreamer-python" in Songbird:

Ken: Thanks for testing this, that's good news.

Mike Smith replied on September 28, 2009 18:19 to the problem "Songbird fails to start on some Linux systems due to gstreamer-python" in Songbird:

I'm also looking into a more "correct" solution to this issue.

Until then, either of the solutions given up the top here should work.

Sorry about this problem, everyone, and thanks for your patience.

Mike Smith set one of Mike Smith's replies as an official response to "Songbird fails to start on some Linux systems due to gstreamer-python" in Songbird

Mike Smith replied on September 28, 2009 18:13 to the problem "Songbird fails to start on some Linux systems due to gstreamer-python" in Songbird:

For those of you having this problem: you should be able to keep gstreamer-python installed, but start songbird like this (from a terminal):

export LD_BIND_NOW=1
./songbird

Can you let me know if this helps?

Mike Smith replied on September 25, 2009 03:01 to the problem "OGG file truncated tags with hyphen" in Songbird:

Hi Chris,

It turns out that your files (or at least the one you sent to me) do NOT have a hyphen at all in the title or album.

What they _do_ have is two title, and two album tags. Some software displays only the first of these. Other software merges them - displaying it as a single string. I guess EasyTag merges them by separating them with a hyphen. Songbird currently just reads the first of them.

If you just change them to have a single title/album tag (which can have a hyphen in it! That's 100% ok), then it should work fine in all apps.

I've never heard of the behaviour about files to quotes in the filenames - I'll have to have a look at that when I have a bit more time.

Mike

Mike Smith replied on September 24, 2009 16:35 to the problem "OGG file truncated tags with hyphen" in Songbird:

I've never heard of this bug - can you provide a file that behaves this way (just in case it's something more complex). Hopefully we can fix it for the next release - and then you won't need to convert your files - that wouldn't be great for audio quality.

Email the file to me at msmith@songbirdnest.com

Mike

Mike Smith replied on September 21, 2009 17:17 to the idea "Create GStreamer Codec's Website" in Songbird:

We put extensive work into making sure GStreamer works well with each release of Songbird.

If instead GStreamer was a separate system-wide thing that we had no control over, we wouldn't be able to fix bugs as they came up.

This isn't a practical answer at all.

Instead, we encourage our community to build additional GStreamer plugins, and create addons to install them - then users can simply download and install the addon.

Mike