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XMMS 1.0.0 Released
Olle Hällnäs wrote in to tell us that XMMS (the premiere GUI MP3 player for Linux these days) has released v1.1.0. Currently they only have rpms and source on the Web site, but I'm sure debs will follow.
I've attached a feature list if you read more.
- CD Plugin now supports CDDB, and CD Index.
- mpg123 plugin now handles compressed id3 frames.
- OSS plugin got a much better and faster resampling routine.
- Setting for adjusting master volume instead of pcm volume.
- New shortkey, ctrl-n for "No Playlist Advance"
- XMMS can now be made "sticky"
- The Equalizer and Playlist don't show up in GNOME/KDE's task list anymore.
- Reload skin shortkey (F5)
- Option to set the speed of the mousewheel.
- Playlist files are now tried to be recognized by content in addition to suffix.
- Added Fullscreen support for visualization plugins. (in libxmms)
- Added DGA support to fullscreen.
- Added xmms-config command.
- XMMS now handles winamp's .wsz skin files.
If you have a read through the xmms forums you will find that the xmms crew are going to start work on a new skin/theme format simmilar to Kjofol, but more powerful, this may be what youre after :)
-- spathi.net: My Corner of the Universe
I used to use GQMpeg back when xmms crashed every 5 minutes. Then I used xmms briefly to listen to shoutcast, but never had a use for the visualization plugins. My biggest quandary was the number of buttons which give no indication of their function. Now I use Broadcast 2000 for everything. It's big and overkill but it's easy to use.
Generally, I only use xmms for show. mpg123 is *so* much more convenient. /mp3 -name '*.mp3' >/usr/local/share/mp3list /usr/local/share/mp3list /etc/rc.d/rclocal :-)
First, run
find
(adjust the path if needed). Then, you only need to run
mpg123 -Z -@
to run your jukebox which plays all your MP3s randomly! If you never play games, you can even add the second line to
Note: you could use the result of find(1) directly in conjunction with xargs(1), but if you file list does not change to often, saving it to a file is faster.
go to:
http://freshmeat.net
learn it; live it; love it.
and search for mpg123 while you're there.
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--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I agree!
I use XMMS, and I think it has a pretty nice UI, but it's complete lunacy that they felt the need to implement window management in an MP3 player!
Developers, if you want k-rad eleet title bars, use a k-rad eleet window manager. If you want to write a window manager, write a window manager. But don't force this inconsistency (in both appearance and functionality) on everybody who just wants to run an MP3 player. You aren't writing an ``MP3 Desktop'', you're just writing a damned app.
gkrellm does the same thing, and it's equally crazy.
I use amp 0.7.6 by tomislav uzelac (search freshmeat.net/appindex) -- seems to work fine for me...
If I have a lot of stuff going in the background, I often do:
nice -n-20 amp "[artist] song.mp3"
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
For those of you who bought this killer plugin, the new version breaks it. Of course all you have to do is:
/usr/lib/libxmms.so.1.0.0 /usr/lib/libxmms.so.0
ln -s
your location may be different for the libs but none the less that will fix it.
This is one example of why I really like to have the source code whenever possible. All I would need to do was recompile against the new libraries. But again, I bought this plugin just because it made things sound SOOO much sweeter.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
There is actually a plugin for K-Jöfol skins, just see under Vizualization plugins at the XMMS Plugin Page
---
Ilmari
© ilmari. All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed
Did it actually play the song? Did you hear sound?
/dev/audio's, the track plays just a little fast.. Not enough to make it worthless, but enough to be noticible and annoying.
I've noticed that sometimes XMMS (when first installed) defaults to the disk writer plugin, which would do exactly what you describe, with no output sound.
Another possible problem is the sound driver. I use the OpenSound Aureal drivers, and if you don't select one of the ``virtual''
Personally - I find xmms to be more convenient than mpg123. I have a private web server that creates playlists from a pointy-clicky javascript tree - and netscape spawning xmms works great. I know that mpg123 could do the same thing, but I don't wanna open an xterm to do it.. and xmms is prettier.
-Jeff
I have AMD K6/2-300. Not exactly the fastest machine. When xmms starts playing a song the CPU load is at 12-14%. Then, after a few seconds, it goes down to well below 1%. Often you can't even see xmms in top. Perhaps you are trying to run it on a 486?
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
"Olle Hällnäs wrote in to tell us that XMMS (the premiere GUI MP3 player for Linux these days"
Do you have any idea how hard it is to undo this? Any Linux user who may be thinking about trying other Unices will take this to mean that XMMS isn't "for" _insert_other_unix_system_here_. It's not intentional I know, and the message is completely subliminal.
Open Source isn't just a catch phrase, it means "./configure && make install". To say that XMMS, or any other program that compiles WITHOUT MODIFICTATION from source is "for Linux" undermines the spirit of Open Source.
This is a big issue for me. I'm a FreeBSD user (I use Linux on my workstation at work, and as a MP3 server at home) and #FreeBSD volunteer and Ports Maintainer, and the "Can I get _insert_open_source_program_here_ for FreeBSD?" gets really annoying.
Even if the question is "There's not an [RPM|DEB] for _insert_open_source_program_here_ for Linux, how can I get it?" (And I've seen this on #Linux) I still think it's important that people realize what it's all about.
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
ever price a high-end sound card?
soundblaster live is about $100 (the 'value' edition). and its still noisier than this dongle since the analog 'tronics are too close to the computer bus.
to get really pure sound, you have to use a digital audio (spdif) card. those start at $400. then you need an external DAC - figure at least $100 for a used one; $300 for a new one. and you STILL don't have a hardware mp3 decoder. not that you really need one but that's extra value you get on this dongle thingie.
after a few weeks of living with the lp3 device, I'd say it comes 90% as close as the spdif solution I just listed. and at a fraction of the price.
the ONLY downside is that you can't pump regular audio thru it - it has to be .mp3 format. I'm guessing that the reason they can get away with a printer port interface is that the audio bandwidth (compressed) can fit in the /dev/lp channel. full digital 44.1/16 audio would certainly not fit in a printer port channel.
one more thought: suppose you use your main computer to store the hundreds of megs (or gigs!) of mp3 files and that system is noisy with fans, chattering disk drives, etc. so you put that machine in your spare room. but you want to listen to your tunes in the bedroom or livingroom. with a conventional analog card, you'd have to run analog wiring for the long distance run. this is lossy and picks up hum. with this device, I would need to run the same length of cable, and it would have to be parallel cable (a bit more expensive and bulky) but its a digital run and not an analog run, so there's zero loss and zero hum pickup. you then place the dongle very close to the preamp of your stereo and bingo: you have extremely low-loss and very high fidelity.
(this is precisely what I intend to do for my hi-end listening room)
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
tell your friend running winamp to go get sonique and you can be jealous again. I keep bugging them for a linux version, but my bug isn't loud enough.
+&x
But is the cost of the LCD and keypad cheaper than a used 386/486 laptop? I wasn't advocating using the built in sound on the laptop (gawd no! SB/16 clones that sound like saws!), but using the laptop to run the dongle. Mount a NFS share from the base PC. You get the nicely noise insulated sound AND a cheap controller. Another advantage of the laptop would be possible addition of an IR transmitter, to control the variety of equipment one inevitably has in his/her sound rack. (Hell, wire a IR LED to the serial port and modulate the port in software..)
.sig: Now legally binding!
According to CmdrTaco, the version number seems to keep falling. It's gone from 1.1.0 to 1.0.0, apparently in the time it takes to write two sentences.
I can't wait for better performance and stability at version 0.1.3-pre5! Open source software has such funny version numbering. I can't wait to see Emacs hit version number parity with the current year, either...
--
E2 IN2 IE?
Do you have any idea how hard it is to undo this? Any Linux user who may be thinking about trying other Unices will take this to mean that XMMS isn't "for" _insert_other_unix_system_here_. It's not intentional I know, and the message is completely subliminal.
No, it's not true that any Linux user will read that as meaning it's only available for Linux. Only those with poor reading comprehension skills.
If someone reads the correct statement "Netscape is the most popular web browser for Linux these days" as meaning "Netscape is only available for Linux", they have poor reading skills. Likewise, if someone read the quoted statement as meaning XMMS is only available for Linux, they too have poor reading skills.
How do we undo this? Better education in the schools, perhaps? I don't know. But I don't think refraining from making accurate and factual statements because they might be misinterpretted is the answer.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
You need to check your glasses! After 99 minutes it switches to 1:40 not 1:00! Please don't post this patch again!
There is at least one known bug for XMMS 1.0.0. The XMMS website says:
Real men dump cores! Read my journal, I am neat.
Make sure that you rebuild and replace the libraries if you're upgrading. I tried to just replace my executable, and it completely blew up. And I'm too lazy to figure out how to get all the libs I want to compile, so I'll go back to work now and wait for the debian packages to arrive.
And God said, "Let there be an MP3 playter that actually works, on an OS that actually works, and let it not be plagued by stupid lawsuits brought about by greed megalomaniac entertainment conglomerates."
And God looked upon the MP3 player , and saw that it was good.
Way to go, programmers!
Judge Pag, the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed
So is it 1.1.0 or 1.0.0 that was just released? Guessing 1.0.0.
When you go to download a .wsz skin, simply rename it to have a .zip extension and save it in your skins directory. A wsz file is simply a zip file renamed to be associated with WinAmp in a Win32 environment.
For more information, click here.
there's a neat little hardware dongle thingie at:
http://lp3music.com
the only limitation is that it can't decode mp3's beyond 192k. that is a bummer - but if you try 192k mode on a good encoder (blade-enc is fine at that rate), you'll be very surprised at the quality; especially with this external decoder unit.
it has the advantage of all the analog electronics being outside the PC. less clock noise and hum = cleaner sound. oh, and since the decode is in hardware, your cpu util. is almost nil. and the best part is that it only needs a printer port - not an ISA or PCI slot. so its perfect for laptops. even older 386 laptops!
oh, and yes, there is linux support for this. they provide links for linux sourcecode to drive this. and there's even some work being done to make this an xmms plug-in; for those who insist on a ooey-gui.
ob disc: I'm just a customer who enjoys this hardware product. I had nothing to do with the design, implementation or anything else for that matter
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Shit!!! Once Again I'm doing a BTDTBTS Post...
t ar.gz
The preliminary release of my liveice plugin for XMMS was just put up today at http://star.arm.ac.uk/~spm/software/liveice-xmms.
For the brave only...
tell your friend running winamp to go get sonique and you can be jealous again. I keep bugging them for a linux version, but my bug isn't loud enough. .mods correctly(which winamp doesn't), has a pretty damn bad interface, with a bad case of "I-really-want-to-look-like-a-hand-held-player-iti s". For example, you have to move the knobs with your mouse, while knobs in real life are designed to be frobbed with one's finger. You can't frob a knob on a screen with your fingers, which makes it a pain. Sliders would be a much better choice. And want to, say, use the equalizer while looking at the spectral analyzer? Too bad. Sonique's interface won't let you. You can cycle through playlist to equalizer to spectral analyzer, but you can't view any of them at the same time.
Sonique, while it looks pretty and actually plays
IMHO, the only thing sonique has over winamp is that it plays mods correctly, and xmms already plays mods correctly.
If 90% of everything isn't crap, your standards are too high.
XMMS is not just an mp3 player. With the aid of the mikmod libraries, it is :)
also a mod file player(that's the music kind of mod file, as in the stuff at the hornet archive). Given the
right plugin, it is also a viable alternative to many hallucinogens
If 90% of everything isn't crap, your standards are too high.
The knobs are awesome, click on a knob, move a mouse, seems pretty simple to me. No, that's not my point. It is simple. It's also stupid. You can't click on a point on a knob and have it move to that value, as you can with a slider or something else. My point was that the sonique interface enforces physical limitations where they aren't needed. I suggest reading up on interface design at a sight like this one.
If 90% of everything isn't crap, your standards are too high.
I tried smartplay, but since it creates a matrix of all your MP3's it takes about 10 minutes to load/save its database of my 2000 MP3's. Cool idea, though.
:)
Hehe.. I keep it to under 600 mp3s, but it still takes a long time. I guess implementing an O(n^2) algorithm in perl was not a good idea.
Well that's why I only claim it to be ``proof of concept.'' It would be nice if one of the real players picks up the idea and dose some real research into the AI side of it too.. and writing stuff in C instead of Perl. Unfortunatly, I have almost no time for this sort of thing.. graduate school eats all my time.
There are also neet things that can be done with AI players on the net which talk among themselves and share songs, i.e. your player makes recomendations to your friends players. It would be a kind of radio that everyone contributed "taste" to, but no one had to put in the time to DJ. It could send out the recommendation once you lissened to the song. You friends system would track how much they liked recommendations from you just like they track mp3s. Unfortunatly, I do not know enough AI or psychology to pull this off, but [addressing everyone] if you are an AI, computer interfaces, or psychology type person then this could make a cool project.
The goal of our user interfaces should be to keep us from waisting our lives screwing arround with the time consuming parts.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
"XMMS runs on Linux." + "Hackers use Linux." = "Hackers use XMMS"
"Hackers use XMMS" + "XMMS plays MP3 files" = "Hey, it's the DeCSS of the music industry!"
I called Vegas and the odds are 2:1 in favor of a DeCSS'ish string of arrests before the day is out. Buckle up everybody! Mirror sites, I pray for you! :)
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
Its this sort of application that is helping bring Linux to the mainstream. The office suites have been out for a little while now. The linux games are starting to sprout up all over the place, and now the multimedia and entertainment utilities are coming through as finished, professional products. Assuming we can get the MPAA off our backs about the CSS fiasco, we're well on the way to being a system that is not only good for the hackers, but useful for the end-user also.
--
"When I grow up, I want to be a weirdo"
I must say I have been really disapointed with the tendency of OSS mp3 player to just copy winamp's skinability. The truth is skins are a really lame form of user configuration because they make it more difficult to change the interface in meaningful ways (as opposed to E themes or something where you actually do reconfigure the interface).
Now, you ask "who would want to change the interface to their mp3 player?" Well there are a lot of reasons, but they mostly boil down to (1) playlists are a waist of time and (2) you will waist you life away skipping songs you are not in the mood to hear if you use random play. I wrote an mpg123 front end called smartplay using perl/gtk which tries to fix these problems. Warning: this is ``proof of concept'' which means it will probable crash sometimes. Features: it uses random play but it displays the list of the next 20 songs it will play and allows you to remove them from the queue at any time, i.e. instead of "hitting skip on a crappy song, going back to work, getting another crappy song and needing to quit work (mentally) to skip it" you can just skip all the shit at once. Also, it tracks you lissening patterns to try and opimize it's random file selector to your mood as determined to the kinds of songs you have been lissening to compleatly.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Press Release
ChangeLog
For those interested, I'll be updating the Solaris plugin to work with 1.0.x releases either today or by Monday at the latest (disasters at work notwithstanding).
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Skins can give you the basic look and feel of any interface you want for your XMMS / WinAmp player.
:), there's some good stuff there... you can find just about anything. Or go to a search engine and search for "winamp skins".
XMMS uses WinAmp skins, and a huge mass of them are available at winamp.com.
As much as all you linux junkies hate going to anything with Win in the title
Personally, I've found the BeAmp skin gives a good BeOS feel, if you want something that's like standard GUI widgets.
There are also nicer skins with custom UI's-- the Fusion based ones are nice, I believe one of those is XMMS's base skin (it is in the version I have, anyway), or try X-perienze for a quasi-futuristic look.
You can always design your own skin too.
--
Talon Karrde
But it's an entirely different program, and in contrast to Winamp fully GPL, which is why it sometimes get's its own thread on sites like Slashdot.
Hope this clears up things a bit.
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
You can easilly download the sourcecode and add a feature, say a command-line --titlebar, or something. Wine has this capability (--window-managed or something like that) which allows the window manager to manage Wine windows, a feature I use whenever running wine as I hate the default WABIesque behavior of sticking to my virtual desktop.
A similar feature for xmms shouldn't be that hard if you really want it, and a friendly suggestion to the developers might work wonders. Myself, I prefer not having title bars on my xmms, but freedom of choice is what Open Source is all about.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
When I tried xmms (after stopping mpg123), it played the song at full speed (using 100% available CPU all the time, no timing), which means it took maybe ten seconds to play a five minute song :-)
Did anyone experience such a bug, too?
From watching the XMMS-devel mailing list, I've heard about this a lot. It seems to be a symptom SMP systems, possibly in the sound drivers.
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I've mailed the xmms team 2-3 times even with patches for this bug.
/= 1000; /= 60;
/= 60;
The timer thinks 1 hour is 99 minutes, so after the timer passes 99:59 it says 1:00:00, but it should wrap after 59:59.
Here is the fix
--- main.c~ Mon Jan 24 20:11:01 2000
+++ main.c Fri Jan 28 15:19:29 2000
@@ -2640,7 +2640,7 @@
stime_prefix = ' ';
}
t
- if (t > 99 * 60)
+ if (t > 60 * 60)
t
number_set_number(mainwin_10min_num, t / 600);
number_set_number(mainwin_min_num, (t / 60) % 10);
--- playlistwin.c~ Mon Jan 24 20:11:02 2000
+++ playlistwin.c Fri Jan 28 15:20:01 2000
@@ -1545,7 +1545,7 @@
if (time 99 * 60)
+ if (time > 60 * 60)
time
text = g_strdup_printf("%c%-2.2d", sign, time / 60);