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Sonique To Come To Linux
chrisbolt writes: "Check this out ... according to DMusic, the FAQ for the next version of Sonique says Sonique 2 will run on Linux! On top of that it will run on BeOS and MacOS, making it the most cross-platform mp3 player available." I'm still in love with XMMS, but have been playing around with other players recently -- and I've heard good stuff about Sonique.
If you remember a while back it was exposed that winamp has a bug in it's "nitrone" engine that f*cks up mp3 decompression. Well from a link (i can't find offhand) Sonique has the similare problem; it doesn't decode the audio correctly.
It's supprising that the two most popular mp3 players in the world can't do this correctly. XMMS which uses mpg123 works flawlessly, a dozen or so players based of the Xing Decoder or Xaudio decoder work fine. Why they use there own faulty mpeg decompression is beyond me.
Another interesting thing about Sonique is it's visulazation SDK, it's being used or memiced is Real Jukebox and Windows Media Player 7. From what i understand you create a function that formats an array based of PCM data. that way it's platform, and format independet (if not a little slower). also the client app can host it in it's own window. Winamp by contrast simply gives you the PCM data and expects you to make a window and draw stuff on the screen. Personally i like winamps approch better, sience it opens up optinos for the plug-in writer like using directX or fullscreen mode, with Sonique and the like you don't have that control.
On the other hand, porting a Sonique plugin to Linux may just mean recompiling it. so we'll see.
I don't think Sonique will be better then XMMS, it's MP3 decompression is flawed, and is less open, (from a plug-in point of view, as well as OpenSource(tm)). XMMS is bassicly a winamp clone, it just needs more people to develop for it, make more DSP and visulation plugins. otherwise Sonique may be the one to use.
-Jon
this is my sig.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
What I like most about Sonique is the UI. It can be simple and uncluttered, or it can be baroque and hellishly complex, depending on what skin you select. It's got nice vis plugins, and a pretty average mp3 decoder.
I've noticed a lot of people here complaining about eye candy, and to each their own, I suppose -- personally, I think that Linux is currently somewhat short of nice-looking apps, and that it could stand to gain a few. Not a judgement on Linux itself, just on Linux UI design.
Freeamp = Windows and Linux.
Sonique2 = Windows, Linux, BeOS, and Mac.
Beware of software companies bearing gifts.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Actually, the Nitrane and Sonique decoding engines are quite error-prone. mpg123 and the fraunhofer decoders are the only ones proven to be the best. Check out this study which points out the differences in decoder quality. His methodology seems sound.
zsazsafrazs
Dude, you must be high. Nitrane is one of the worst decoding engines out there. Most people I've heard from have seen a noticeable increase in audio quality when switching from Nitrane to the Fraunhofer-based Winamp plugin from Winamp 2.22 or the plugin based on mpglib from LAME (note that those two plugins have nearly identical output). You can see a comparison of a bunch of different decoders here.
"Also, Winamp fits into a nice 274x114 space. Sonique looks as if it takes up over 400x400. "
:-) that expanded a bit on mouseover. Not as compact as WinAMP's WindowShade mode, but not too bad.
FWIW, I recall Sonique having a compact mode that took about 150x50px (could be wrong, it's been a year or two
-aardvarko
webmaster at aardvarko dot com
It just rolled out of my mind and off my tongue once I read that.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Among the anomolies:
- Skips samples during the first second of file, resulting in audible click.
- Audible low frequency glitches in many files.
- Faults in the decoding engine itself include audible mistakes below 15 kHz and a few mistakes above too.
- The right channel is decoded correctly (only
occasional 1-bit difference from l3dec), but the left channel is destroyed...
- Sonique HQ decode mode also inverts the signal.
It's overall recommendation:"Until the mp3 decoding is fixed, Sonique is a player to avoid. If you're using it to decode mp3s, stop!"
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
Now, could somebody please explain why the fuck do we need yet ANOTHER damn mp3 player, binary-only no less? We have, like FreeAMP, XMMS, gmpeg and some others, and that's only counting the ones that use gtk+; I'm sure there are a few for KDE too.
Furrfu!
What are you using to track CPU usage? The only reliable CPU meter I've found for Windows is Wintop from the Win95 Kerneltoys package (it also works on Win98).
mpg123 is great, but it doesn't seem to support variable-rate MP3s. As these are the majority of what one seems to be able to download from MP3.com these days, I'm finding it really annoying to have to start X just to play some tunes, especially since I do all of my development work in console text mode.
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Am I the only one who finds gqmpeg the best X mp3 player? It doesn't suffer from the resource intensive aspects that XMMS does; plus its just a frontend to mpg123 (which we all know is the greatest console mp3 player)!
Isn't Sonique also closed source? Why would anybody be interested in seeing it on linux then?
Given that BeOS does not support arbitrary-shaped windows, a BeOS port of Sonique will either be using the BeOS port of X11 (which would suck), or it will not be using those cool morphing windows (which would suck too). Sonique and BeOS are both very nice, but I'm afraid a combination of the two won't make anybody happy...
here's the WA3 FAQ: http://www.winamp.com//nsdn/win amp3x/betanews.jhtml
-- Jarsonic
Since Sonique .55beta came out, all the linux users who have gotten the chance to use Sonique on windows have been begging for a linux version. Not to mention this is the one reason I'm still in windows right now. When sonique is finally released for linux, hopefully sometime in early 2001, this will be a major deal for a number of reasons. First of all, it will bring the best sounding mp3 decoder to linux, which has always been a huge problem which has kept me from wanting to reboot to linux. Secondly, for those who know about Sonique, it's "liquid" feel would be amazing to see in linux, although I might be wrong, I think this will be a first for the Linux world. I'm very impressed with the sonique dev crew that they have spent the time to make their code very portable, it sounds like they have thought everything through in this new version to make a program that actually will dominate, as their egos would love it seems. So when Sonique is released for Linux, there will finally be a great looking, awesome sounding, mind bending media player that will make a lot of users stuck in Windows that demand great audio quality making the big switch.
.plans you probably know already it is a very modular system. From what I can gather, Winamp3 could in fact be just as portable. The thing is though, they are aware that XMMS is basically the linux clone which does everything needed, so it seems they are putting their efforts towards a needed mac clone of the program. However, there is always the possibility we'll see a linux clone one of these days.
But lets look at Winamp 3.0 for a second, for those of you who have been reading NSDN, and the
There's only one thing that could make the fact sonique is being created for linux better: Open source.
So, finally, after years of wanting a good mp3 player for linux, one that can really compete with the Windows ones, it seems we have it.
Thanks,
David Gorman
http://gorman.modblog.com
No. XMMS doesn't use 37 meg.
You seem to be falling victim to the Mozilla Memory Escalation Misunderstanding. That is, under Linux, when a program has multiple threads, you _do not_ add up the memory usage of all the threads to get the total memory usage! The total memory usage is simply the memory usage of _one_ of the threads.
Granted, some graphical process meters complicate things by automatically adding up all of the threads. Try using the textmode top to see what it is really using.
Oh yeah? I hereby present my own mp3 player, the Foo(TM).
Unlike Sonique 2, this "Foo" program of yours is just vaporware.
Once you get a slashdot story all to yourself, I'll believe this "Foo" program actually exists.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Well, I'm the one who has been doing the Linux porting, so I guess I can tell you this much: at various stages of development, Sonique 2 has been running just fine in Linux. Right now, since we're developing it rapidly, it's going to need some work to get it as good as the Windows version. But it DOES run. I'm going to have to rewrite some parts of the graphics code, since I'm using GDK and it seems to have some limitations (the main one right now is that when you change the size of a window it fills it with black which doesn't look very good) and I need to redo the font support. So although I have to put more work right now into the Windows version (this will be the first one that will be released) you can rest assured that this isn't just hot air. I don't even HAVE Windows at home. So you'd think that I would make sure that Sonique will be working in Linux at the first possible opportunity :)
P.S. Sonique for Linux will run on pretty much any modern configuration. I don't depend on anything much that isn't standard in X.
-- Nicholas Vinen, Team Sonique
I use mpg123 0.59r to play VBR MP3s all the time. The only difficulty comes from some that I've created using LAME with tweaked-out options, which generates 'free-form' MP3 that mpg123 chokes on.
The CVS version supposedly fixes this, but I've not tried it.
Kid-proof tablet..
That's a pretty poor reality test. Like nothing mentioned on Slashdot ever turned up as vapor...
so how are they doing it ..gtk/qt/X ..with mpg123 what else do u need
Sure it looks cool and has a nice animated interface, but the most important feature to me seems to be the least important to whoever makes sonique. That would be playlisting and playlist control. Xmms has the best playlisting yet that I know of. Playlisting is the most important thing about an mp3 player. I'm unexcited, but i'll try it and i hope that sonique 2 has great playlist support.
If anyone wants really slick looking skins for xmms then you need to go to http://www.dgs.monash.edu.au/~timf/xmms/ and get the kjolfol plugin for xmms. I adds support for all kinds of cool sonique-ish skins, then go to customize.org and download some cool skins for it.
I was just wondering if this program was open source or not.
-andy
In which case, use SoundJam.
It decodes, encodes, has alpha-transparent skins, and IMHO, a *way* better UI than Audion. And is about to be released for OS X again (they pulled their earlier version to make sure it's compatible with the new Beta)
Then again, I think a lot of these damn skins are friggin ugly and mostly useless: I mean ask yourself: how many time do I sit there *just looking at my MP3 player*?! I always load up the playlist and hide it.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Notice how Windows wasn't mentioned along with Be and MacOS on the article? jeez.
Coming from an audio background, I can tell you that decoding engines are not all the same (not even for CD's, listen to a Wadia decoding engine sometime), especially for mp3. Everyone in the linux community is used to using mpg123 because it's open and free. That's too bad, cuz it rots compared to better engines out there, like Winamp's Nitrane, and Sonique's, which they call Stardust if I remember correctly. I am a linux and windoze user, and one of the frustrating things to me with Linux mp3 players is that they all use mpg123, and there's been nothing comparable to the better engines available on Windoze platforms. Hopefully this will be it.
That was a review on an older version. The current version is 1.63 and it has a new decoder called AE4.
Sonique sucks. I downloaded the windows version, the executable is tiny, but when it runs, it uses over 32MB of memory. Not to mention it was buggy as hell and the visualization crap used tons of resources. You know it's bad when the girlfriend complains.... :)
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
One of the questions asked was "Would the Linux community accept a program called 'WinAmp' or should we change the name?"
And yeah, "LinAmp" was a favorite!
The cake is a pie
Oh yeah? I hereby present my own mp3 player, the Foo(TM).
Where is it? Well, it's actually a blank text file. By offering you to program whatever you want into the program, it offers you incredible flexibility and customizations. One of the features that you can decide right away is "will it compile or not compile?" Foo can even be customized to be a word processing application if you want, or even an OS if you try really really hard.
I bet no other mp3 players offer THAT kind of flexibility. The sky's the limit yo!
The best MP3 player for Linux is X Audio Runs on lots of other platforms too. It's not free though.....
Memory hog maybe, but not CPU. Sonique 1.63 right now on my W2K box is not quite taking up 1% of the CPU's time while using 10MB of memory.
And Lycos = BMG. Haven't they made a big stink about MP3 distrobution in Germany? I wonder if Sonique will start pushing a "secure" MP3 alternative at some time.
--
--
blinko - "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down"
I'm using the Performance Monitor that comes with Windows 2000. Sonique right now is averaging 0.6%, that's while playing. I'll gladly try another monitoring program, Wintop won't work on Windows 2000.
Well now that Sonique is on Linux, We can look forward to RMS screaming about how their source license violates the GPL. I'm tired of his communist antics. That bastard.
Note, I am not a very good troll, for better ones, see the troll homepage.
Thank you.
Hmmm... maybe you should try a newer version of mpg123? I use mpg123 0.59r on both my LinuxPPC desktop machine and my Debian-i386 laptop and it does just fine with VBR...
I encode all of my mp3's with LAME, using a high quality VBR setting (average bitrate is usually 160bps, min bitrate is 112bps, and max is 320bps)
These files work well with winamp, mpg123, Sonique, XMMS, and mp3blaster (which, if you are fond of working in console mode, is a great text based player with playlist and everything... )
(All above mentioned open-source programs [i.e., not winamp and Sonique] can be found by searching freshmeat, or on Debian just apt-get it :-) )
RIAA did not 'encrypt' those mp3.
skin SUCKS. Why everybody is making this crap. I want a standard GUI player.
Time for me to suit up, it's troll time...
I've played with Sonique on windows, and best as I can tell, it is Yet Another MP3 Player, although with prettier skins. In a way, I dislike XMMS for being so heavy on the superficialities (that a word?), but I can't ditch it because I like it's functionality.
Hey, I'll be porting my C-based wrapmail program to FreeBSD and Linux! Think that'll make it to
Froid didn't say it made sense, only that the RIAA should use it. Making sense is not a required paramter of RIAA arguments.
From what I can tell, the scene has more or less given up on linux. . . secure OS in general aren't that friendly towards the kinds of stuff demo coders like to do, which often require more direct access to the hardware than linux wants to provide.
Please explain to me what the big deal is.
1) mp3 decoding doesn't take much CPU power anymore. Therefore, explain to me what this *awesome* decoding engine is, and how I'll notice a difference. Otherwise, I'll continue to use the mpg123 engine for all my mp3 decoding needs.
2) Most good graphical players support WinAmp skins; therefore, they all have virtually the same interface. How will Sonique be different?
What I'm *really* waiting for is the port of OpenCP to Linux. Cubic was the *best* mod player back in the day, and it played mp3's and midi's later on, too. And it had cool visualization... I'm sure that anything those guys put out would be 10x better than the crud we have now, *and* it'd be demo-style!
Interoperability between the Windows and Linux versions hopefully will be good, because exchanging themes between the two versions of Sonique will hopefully be easier than exchanging themes between Winamp and XMMS.
And will the amorphous window shapes have better luck under Linux because of differences in Windows and Linux display methods? That's a question u should think about.
Hey
The skinsystem is cool tho, with sort of non-rectangular skins, for example, you can have a round Sonique. That's different from Winamp, where all basic layouts look the same square (boring).
The also have some really nice vis's.
Feels good it's coming to other OS's too.
English is not my first language, so cut me some slack -: Om du kan lasa det har sa kan du Svenska
Presumably, this will be closed source app. I don't like the idea of running what someone else wrote when I can't check it, as bugs could cause data loss.
You sure did check every line of mpg123's source code. Right.
--
This space left intentionally blank.
So don't run it... I suppose you checked the entirety of the Linux source code before running that? Get a life, it's an mp3 player for Christ's sake--data loss my ass.
The only certainty is entropy.
Great, I'm really excited.
m umblemumblegoesGreatWit hEnlightenmentmumblemuble
mumblemumblebloatedBuggymumblemumblewhoNeedsSkins
Let me help you moderate this: flamebait
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
So you think you have a choice between the over rated Sonique, or the crap XMMS?
My God people, can someone please email the Geek compound a copy of FreeAMP? Win32 & Linux (And i believe, BeOS is in the works).
Anyway, whats the big deal about Sonique? It's an MP3 player for Gods sake, as long as it plays MP3's, i'm happy.
It seems that all these media players are trying for eye candy. As long as it plays music that is what I care about.
Are the moderators high this morning, or has someone slipped LSD into my morning Mountain Dew?
-- Count Spatula: The Culinary Vampire "...because my cooking sucks."
Why don't they declare mp3 encoding to be a form of encryption, thereby making all mp3 players (like Sonique) an illegal device whose sole purpose is to circumvent that encryption and decode the RIAA's copyrighted works? Since there are no legal definitions of what a legitimate encryption standard must entail, and since we're all aware that mp3s are entirely effective at preventing people with old Linux boxes from decoding them (less so for PCs and Macs, but the principle holds), it just might work. And more importantly, it would give the RIAA a legal leg to stand on in criminalizing all those copyright violations occurring right now, where non-DMCA law has been slow to act.
Cheers,
Froid
"In order to bring the product to the linux market faster, Sonique will require a special modified version of WINE to run in, and will have a memory footprint of 37.5 megs and require at least a P3-500..."
Only kidding.... I hope....
You really do know what the appropriate title for this article should have been, don't you? Sonique to become multi-platform. I'm sure it wouldn't have been accepeted had it read like this...
Sonique to come to BeOS:
.......
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Oh, yea, and it will run on Linux and MacOS too.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I say you should try the program first. If something seems very wrong with it, contact whoever the company lists as a developer. If they list no one, then get that binary scum the hell off your hard drive!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I'd like to know how it'll handle modularization. I know that Sonique has a very fast, modular mp3 decoder, and I was wondering if that will be used (ported if necessary) or if it will use mpeg123. I hope it's the former. Also, will all the skins and visualization plugins be cross platform? That'd be sweet. I hope it has good ogg support...
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Freeamp, on the other hand, is a completely open source, GPL'd MP3 player, and it's already available for Linux and Windows. Plus, the themes are entirely controlled by an XML-based description file and a few bitmaps. I stopped using WinAmp when AOL announced it was going to include anti-piracy measures of some kind.
Do the right thing. Use Freeamp instead. Yes, it's not perfect, but it's getting better daily, and it's OPEN SOURCE and FREE SOFTWARE, so you can do whatever the hell you want with it!
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
...everyone else seems to have them.
:)
I've seen sonique... Sure, it's got pretty skins, but outside of that, XMMS 0wnz it. Xmms also has the benefit of maturity on Linux, so it'll probably be a lot more stable. What I'm wondering is: "when will xmms's UI be a plugin?" Everything else about xmms is based on plugins, so why not the UI, as well? With a couple of UI plugins, xmms could use any theme available.
Would using plugins for the UI make xmms a "microkernel" application?
Anyway, a previous post mentioned a visualization plugin for xmms, which I tried. It's almost good. But, trying to be a UI in a visualization plugin causes a few problems, like closing the application and restarting it with NO available UI. This would be a lot easier for developers and users if xmms's UI were a plugin, too.
Yes! RMS is indeed a communist!
I know that quality of sound is important to most folks, but I use mpg123 simply because it doesn't suck memory like xmms, for an example, I fired up gtop and xmms, started playing an mp3, and xmms sucked up 37 Megs of memory, what a waste. Mpg123 uses a little over a megabyte while playing the same mp3. I like the gui, but until it gets a little more conservative with my precious resources, I'll stick to the command line.
"Only the insane have the strength enough to prosper, only those that prosper truly judge what is sane." --Warhammer40k
The RIAA would have to encode every song in mp3 and then they would have to replace every mp3 in the world with the mp3 that they encoded. Your idea doesn't make any sense at all.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Sonique is pretty nice. The interface is very tight, smooth, and much more "artsy" (stuff slides and fades). The skins and vis are also dumb easy to install (with the player running) and full screen dancing shit is only a click away. There's also a cleary marked "save to disk" toggle, and you can switch between three different views to maximize screen use. It also has auto restart if you lose your stream cache.
A couple caveats. I haven't found the "bookmark streams" button, and it doesn't seem to be connected to the cddb. I use it more often on my winbox now that winamp likes to report to aol whenever I fire it up.
--
+&x
and ignoring all the people who want to kill linux by protesting any program that tries to come to the platform without opening all their source or releasing binaries for each of the 15,0000 possible linux setups, stuff like this is still good news. Hopefully, someday it won't be news anymore when an app comes to linux.
________
Like nothing mentioned on Slashdot ever turned up as vapor...
Well, we can be certain the Sonique 2 port to Linux is not itself vaporware. Because, you see, the website "Dimension Music" says that "Team Sonique" plans a "technology demonstration" "before the end of the year" on a new version of Sonique. And, of course, the new version of the software "currently runs on linux."
If I had read about this on anything except slashdot, I would exclaim, "You stupid dimension music reporter! How can they have a version of Sonique 2 that runs on Linux, when they apparently don't even have a version that runs at all yet? Why are reporters such stupid consumers of press reports?"
But, of course, I read about the next version of Sonique 2 on Slashdot, so I know its true. After all, Slashdot would never post a linux story without completing its rigorous policy of fact checking. Otherwise, those thousands and thousands of ad impressions would be wasted on people reading and responding to a totally bogus story. Thank God that the only pointless flamebait cruft that ends up on slashdot are the penis-birds posted by anonymous cowards.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I haven't actually seen the Be version. But non-rectangular windows is like half of what working under BeOS entails. I don't know which of my coworkers did the port, but if it were hard, they wouldn't have done it.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
It's important for my computers to have the latest and best MP3 players, and the kids today are really into MP3s, and I want to make them comfortable when they come over.
Anyone have any early Britney Spears to trade? She's just not as alluring now that she's older.
P. Naughton
We're not going to like implement every multimedia compression standard known to man. We only have like 6 coders, you know.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
+ and - change the resolution of full screen vis's in sonique. =P
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Of course it's not vaporware. I can send you the blank file right now if you want. just cut and paste it to "foo.c" --> begin "foo.c" -- end "foo.c" see? I told you so.
the skinning system will make you "WET YOURSELF."
Oh Good. Another MP3 player is availiable. With a skinning system. Now I can make sure that my MP3 player definately doesn't colour-coordinate with any of my other apps, all of which are done in Gray. Hopefully I'll be able to make the entire program display shadows-only on top of a background photograph of my choice, allowing me to stare at a photo all the time my MP3 player is the top window on my screen, me not being busy doing anything else.
Hurrah!
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
My company, eTantrum, ships a free player for Linux (and Windows) that (right now) does song identification as well as audio visualization, and it ships with a variety of killer skins.
o ad
http://www.etantrum.com/index.php?section=downl
Also check out our GPL'ed Songprint song identification SDK at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freetantrum/
Tastes Like Chicken
It seems to me that one of Linux's strong points, its wide array of choices and openness, also happens to be one of its weak points at the same time. Please note, that I'm not trying to say that Linux sucks, or even anything remotely resembling that.
What I want to ask is: Does anyone have any ideas on how to get rid of the bad aspects of that quality, while preserving its good aspects?
--
Sure I thought the same thing before - "An mp3 player is an mp3 player - right?" But Sonique actually has BETTER sound quality than Winamp, or K-jöfol. A friend of mine pointed this out, but I didn't believe him until I sat down and compared the three. Sonique really had better sound quality(k-jöfol just plain sucked:p). On the visual side, the fact that the Sonique skins aren't restricted to a rectangular shape AND the fact that the buttons don't have to be in one specific place makes for some inventive designs - and I'm all for that. So stop whining about this new fancy mp3 player invading your system, if you don't want to use it - DON'T, it's as simple as that. Just my two cents
And I, personally, love it. It totally 0wnz Winamp in almost all respects, except that it can't do full-screen viz plugins at any res. higher than 640*480. I hope the Mac OS port is Carbonized, at least. So, the way I see it, if mp3 decoding takes up minimal cpu time these days, then Sonique takes up the slack with its crazy skins and visual plugins.
P.S.: Ever notice how NONE of the new programs for X can ever be executed properly in 640x480, yet ALL of the programs in Windows can? (or at the very least they tell you if they can't.)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I've used Sonique, and compared to WinAmp or XMMS it feels very heavy.
;)
I love WinAmp and XMMS for their speed and uasbility, so I have to say Sonique is too non-practical on a large playlist, or just for everyday used.
However, I belive it will fit in nicely with the style of my MacOSX beta arriving tomorrow
-Knut S.
But like most mp3 players, it seems to have problems doing really simple things - like (gasp) dropping a bunch of files onto it and having them end up in the correct order (sorted by track). Sonique can't do it, WinAmp can't do it, the only ones I've seen that can are XMMS and SoundPlay for BeOS. I'll probably end up installing Sonique for BeOS, but mostly just for eyecandy - nothing can match the feature set of SoundPlay.
-lx
Sonique currently does MP3, plus a number of more closed file formats like WMA [Windows Media Audio].
How will Linux Sonique support these file formats under Linux? Currently thes best technology has been the open soucrce reverse engineered version of Microsofts AviFile [http://divx.euro.ru/], which uses a small part of WINE and TWIN to call Windows-based media codecs, for MS MPEG 4, Intel Indeo, Cinepak, DivX, and other Windoes based file formats.
Will Sonique port these file formats, or create a similar implementation to AviFile, or soemthing else?
(For those too young to remember, two years ago, KJ was supposed to be ported to linux too.)
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Sonique, in my personal opinion, isn't the best MP3 player out there. Yes, it supports multiple file formats and it doesn't rely on ads, but it sucks up system resources like you wouldn't believe. Then again, this is Linux we're talking about - that may not be a problem anymore. If the developers can overcome the problem that was brought up a few times in this discussion - the difficulty of supporting every file type - Sonique for Linux could be a great success.
Unless Lycos change their mind before the release it won't be open source.
-------------
Peace Out [xplo]
There does happen to be an MP3 player which is fully functional yet does not use skins.
Also, its playlist is extremely flexible.
find -name '*.mp3' | while read filename; do mpg123 -b 1024 $filename
Doesn't that just scream functionality!? Note the hyper-flexible playlist generator.
No frills at all.
I'm wrong. It doesn't actually do non-rectangular windows. They were going to support that in BeOs 5, but then with the whole internet appliance thing they forgot or something.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Let me clarify this a bit..
Given our current user base, obviously the main development work happens on Windows boxes. However, we are all committed to portability.
Oh, and WRT opening the source: We'd like to, but don't own the IP (when Lycos bought Sonique, well that made them own it.) so that question is not ours to decide.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Mmmhhh, BeOS has native mp3 support, last time I checked. You can even drag'n'drop mp3 files into the CD-Burner app and they're automagically (and on the fly) converted into regular audio-CD tracks. Bah, one more cool app won't hurt!
/. is drooling over OS X, which isn't really GPL compliant either. Get some community support for BeOS, please! Port your apps!
BeOS is really, really cool with media files. Being able to play as many mp3 files as you want *simultaneously* isn't bad, albeit not very useful. But it proves BeOS's multitasking excellence, since you can have several video feeds running along with 25 mp3's, with no apparent slowing down.
With OpenGL, Java and BONE (BeOS Network Environment) coming, I *really* wish more software vendors would port their apps to BeOS. IMHO, BeOS is near perfect for a desktop OS. Boots in 10 seconds, is fast, doesn't crash, has friendly and polite advocates... but isn't Open-Source.
Heck, half of
/max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.