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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.
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!
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.
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Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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...
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.
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
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.....
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.
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
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
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
God dammit! Why the fuck do we need ANOTHER OpenSource UNIX clone when *BSD is already available!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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!
I'll continue to use the mpg123
only thig is, most mp3 players that use mpg123, including xmms, are memory hogs.
Most good graphical players support WinAmp skins...How will Sonique be different
Try taking a look at Sonique. It's nothing like what you've probably seen if you think WinAmp is all there is. Sonique's interface is much prettier. And personally, I like it's UI better than any other player out there. It does have support for skins, but I'd rather leave it at the default.
_______________
you may quote me
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?
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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
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
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.
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* 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?"
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.
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!
OpenCP would be very cool, though. MikMod is pretty good I must say, but a player just isn't a player without a few (dozen) FFTs.
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.
That's different from Winamp, where all basic layouts look the same square (boring).
Not that I'm into skins, but does anyone know whatever happened to a0? At one point, the WinAmp crew was working on a cool-looking dynamic skin thingy called a0 for WinAmp, which came as a general purpose plugin for WinAmp. Anyone know what's up?
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