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Nightingale Media Player Preview Released
First time accepted submitter ilikenwf writes "You may or may not remember the Mozilla-based Songbird media player, which dropped official Linux support in April, 2010. Since then, the Nightingale community fork has waxed and waned in terms of membership and progress, but thanks to having a completely new dev team has today produced a preview build based on Songbird 1.8.1. The team promises a release of a Songbird trunk based build later this year, with fixes and an upgrade to Gecko 6. Plans to support Linux, Windows, and Mac are in the works, with the preview builds being available only for Linux and Windows at the moment. Aside from trying to pull in refugees from the Songbird community, Nightingale wants more developers to aid in fixing dropped and broken features from Songbird — and to add new ones."
Their playlist interface and lyric plugin was great. Though now I'm using amarok instead
Or Rhythmbox, or Amarok, or Banshee, or Exaile, or Guayadeque...
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
What I want to know is why a media player needs a web browser engine (Gecko 6) in it.
VLC works, but it sure isn't user friendly.
Same could be said for email. It adds nothing but bloat. I am an intelligent person, I can read. I don't need some fancy formatting. Forums are the same. Give me access to newsgroups and my client can format it the way I want to. No one else needs to define the look for me.
Because if it can handle /. then for a media player it should be able to be able to provide "near instantaneous" performance but still have the extension capability of the Firefox browser.
I actually really like Spotify's UI. It's one of the best there is. However, I mainly listen to kpop and that catalog isn't so good in Spotify, so I use grooveshark.
Same could be said for email. It adds nothing but bloat. I am an intelligent person, I can read. I don't need some fancy formatting. Forums are the same. Give me access to newsgroups and my client can format it the way I want to. No one else needs to define the look for me.
looks puzzlingly at the HTML used in the previous comment
XUL interface app with web streaming and music store sources displayed in the rightmost viewport.
Nope. Not at all! Your client simply formatted it the way you wanted it to.
I finally settled on Audacious. It still has lots of features I never use, but the interface is simple.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Right! But admittedly, it's a lot more friendly than those who develop it. As their support forums prove beyond any shadow of a doubt. These are the kind of people who give open source software a bad name. The Sheldon-Cooper-types.
I interviewed with them down in Santa Monica maybe 4 years back. They had hired the WinAmp guys and they were working on a media player with HTML integration in it. It really didn't seem like all that good of an idea.
HTML 5 Makes most of that obsolete and most of what I see people doing like Apps, Flash, download players etc.
To be honest, I only have a Yahoo Account just for IM and have never even looked to see what they are doing with Music these days.
I still think the Original Napster was the best service, if there were such a service for a flat rate I'd be a happy camper.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
That would be to render the store interfaces so you can be sold more content in-app.
Anyone know if the windows version supports adding/removing files from an iPod classic? Still trying to find a tool that's not shit for that particular purpose...
Frankly while I liked some of the features when Firefox went bloaty so did Songbird naturally so I switched to Kantaris and since its based on VLC it is NOT bloaty. Its also FOSS so if anybody wants to code a Linux or Mac version feel free! Its really nice BTW, great UI and makes handling large media libraries quite friendly. I give it to all my customers still on XP (those on 7 like me are happy with the new WMP) and they are quite pleased.
TFA does show one of the nice things about FOSS though, if somebody cares about a piece of software and has the skills it can continue, even if the devs quit giving a shit. KDE 3, GNOME 2, still alive thanks to those that liked them over the new bling bling heavy versions. I'll probably get hate for asking this but WTF, what is it with Linux DEs lately? I thought Linux was supposed to be the LIGHT OS, now with KDE 4, Gnome Shell, and Unity it looks like you guys are trying to give MSFT a run in the "pointless bling bling bullshit" dept, what gives? At the rate things are going by gnome 4/KDE 5 you'll need a quad and GPU with 1Gb of RAM just to run the desktop. Geez if you want to rip something off of MSFT rip the jumplists or breadcrumbs, not the bloat.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
VLC is my preferred DVD player. I rip all my discs to ISO file and VLC has no problem playing the files as if they were real discs.
That being said, VLC does have quite a bit of functionality that I don't understand.
1. Stability
First time importing my songs: Crash
Second time importing my songs: Went fine
2. Online Integration
All the help / addons / web integration stuff seems to be no-show. The pages are 404's, empty, or wiki not found's...
3. Video Playback (or lack thereof)
Attempted to load some videos and it constantly complained about not having the codecs to play them. The 'solution' given was to visit the Wiki page... which doesn't exist...
Well, at least the media playback and selection works more or less after getting started. Its not in a state which I'd consider switching, but it has at least some potential.
Bye!
There is a difference between a media player and a media manager and songbird has some capability in that direction which i'm hoping Nightingale might improve on.
Here is my problem which maybe addressed by Songbird/Nightingale.
I have a Nas with a 2 TB drive with assorted files on some of which are music files some have correct tagging data (under various tag schemes) and some do not.
I'd like to put all the Mp3 files under artist/album/track separated from the rest of the mess
To be honest I'd Like to organise my photo's video's pdf's ebooks, iso files ect similarly so i'm more than willing to hear any good strategies for pulling these together as well as any method for removing duplicates.
Songbird has an option to copy and organise songs under a single directory
with the artist/album/track structure unfortunately the last time i tried it wanted to put everything under unknown artist unknown album, making a bad situation worse.
I'd love to go further and be able to separate out podcasts and audio books and English music from other language music.
I'd like to be able to correctly catalogue some of my music which i ripped from cd over a decade ago
with correct meta data.
I'd love to just have playlists naturally generated for an album.
I d like to be able to easily pull tracks together for my portable players too.
Maybe when my music is organised then i will only need just a media player
playing a music track has never been a problem even banshee manages to play the video's i record on my camera now with the audio track.
I think some of what i want can be done with shell scripts. If anyone has some good examples please post them!
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Please... Try to make gapless MP3 playback work. Or if it's the fault of the underlying engine, file bugs against it; you are better positioned to understand the issues.
<semi-rant> I remember that it took Apple ages to fix this in iPods and iTunes; then they finally did when the 2nd gen Nano was released. But it stayed fixed after that. There are rumors that some versions of gstreamer had functional gapless MP3, but it later broke and nobody bothered to fix it. Why is it so difficult? Does nobody notice? Does anybody listen to, say, Pictures at an Exhibition? (You'd notice.) Sigh.</semi-rant>
I'm a kpop nut too.
Clementine has this option. Under Preferences > Playback > Fading
Check ON 'Cross-fade when changing tracks automatically. Default between songs is 2000 ms and is adjustable.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
gapless != cross-fade. An MP3 stream is divided into frames that are larger than CD frames. If a song ends in the middle of a frame, that frame is padded with silence which cause an audio dropout when playing albums with continuous sound, like live recordings for example. Most modern MP3 encoders (at least LAME) use a non-standard (but nowadays defacto-standard) tag to store the exact byte on which the song ends so players can skip the silent padding and play the album just like the original CD would had. Worth noting is that this problem is MP3-specific. All modern codecs/containers already handle this natively.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Is it not worth my while going onto the forums and asking them to fix the infuriating habit VLC has of crashing repeatedly on OSX at the slightest hint of a buffer underrun? (How about the people who code(d) MPlayer OSX Extended, btw? That normally runs OK for me on Intel but the PPC version is the shittest piece of shit I've ever encountered, and I've encountered actual shit.)
These are actually serious questions, I'm getting mildly frustrated trying to find a properly stable Mac movie player that isn't bloated and features a few decent deinterlacers. Even with Perian I'm not a massive fan of QT...
As a totally off-topic question, why was MP3 designed with such large frames? To me it would have made sense to have fixed them to the CD, or to an integer divisor of them, since it must have been obvious from the start that a large use for MP3 would be storing audio from CDs?
Please... Try to make gapless MP3 playback work. .... Does nobody notice? Does anybody listen to, say, Pictures at an Exhibition? (You'd notice.) Sigh.</semi-rant>
Yes, and yes. This is one of my criteria for a media player. Currently I'm using MOC (MOCP under Ubuntu since it conflicts with QT's Meta Object Compiler). It's not the prettiest thing in the world, but it does do gapless playback and it doesn't require everything to be stuffed into some kind of media library first (this makes it handy if you need to scan through a bunch of sound clips or something).
If you want gapless mp3, you can still use XMMS. The xmms-crossfade plugin also handles gapless output.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yep, I'm totally hooked to Exaile. Small bug still: adding files to a playlist while it's playing a song from said playlist crashes it. Apart from that, very cool player. Was using Songbird before it and I probably won't go 'back' to Nightingale now.
I *think* it's the UI; if I remember right I've actually run from the command-line, but I'll have to check on that. It wouldn't surprise me if it were crappy drivers on the PPC version of OSX, I must admit. Especially if you had problems with the drivers before.
and get on with your life.
Possibly I guess.
As a totally off-topic question, why was MP3 designed with such large frames? To me it would have made sense to have fixed them to the CD, or to an integer divisor of them, since it must have been obvious from the start that a large use for MP3 would be storing audio from CDs?
The discrete cosine transform that mp3 uses typically requires about 512 samples to effectively capture the necessary coefficients that represent a statistically coherent unit of audio, or "frame" in mp3's terminology. So, it's a technical constraint, not a design one. Smaller frames wouldn't be able to accurately sample low frequencies.
Also, there wouldn't be much compression if you had 44100 frames per second, would it?
What I want to know is why a media player needs a gui. Data in, audio out is all you really need.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Formatted hypertext with images is a common and effective way to present data to the user. In the case of a media player, this can include album or movie data, lyrics, liner notes, or, as others have noted more cynically, a store.
Browser engines are as good a method as any of providing that functionality. They're better than many, in fact. Reusing an existing engine is less bloaty than cooking up a new one for every task.
Thanks very much.
And a very good point about the number of frames :)
I dunno. Mebbe you want to access metadata that just happens to be on the web? The web is the world's library.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Have fun playing stuff on the proprietary OS of your choice then.
It's like a world without zinc.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
VLC is more than just a copy of iTunes or WMP.
If you find those other things confusing and disturbing, then leave those parts of the app alone.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You're forgetting the video part. "Media player" != "music player". Most people prefer some kind of gui so they don't have to remember all the hotkeys for changing volume, changing tracks, ordering track playback, and setting all kinds of various options. This goes for playing both audio-only and video files.
Most C++ GUI applications don't use a browser engine to present formatted text and graphics to users, and they seem to work just fine, without having nearly as large a footprint as a browser. Worse, re-using an existing engine may require less developer time, but it's still bloaty, unless your browser-engine-media player is sharing the same engine as your regular web browser. It's pretty obvious that's not the case here; this one will load its own slightly different browser engine, consuming tons of memory, in addition to your regular web browser. Personally, I use Amarok, and that (AFAIK) doesn't use any kind of browser engine to show its UI, nor do most other GUI apps today.
Now of course, if you're trying to show web-based music stores in your media player application, that obviously calls for a browser engine. Now why I'd want an open-source ripoff of iTunes, I have no idea.
My media player, Amarok, seems to already do this, with lyrics fetching, and also linking to several independent music stores like Magnatune, without (AFAIK) needing to use a browser engine. Lots of apps fetch data from the web, but they don't fetch it in HTML format, but as raw data, and display it with much lighter weight code.
The discrete cosine transform that mp3 uses typically requires about 512 samples to effectively capture the necessary coefficients that represent a statistically coherent unit of audio, or "frame" in mp3's terminology.
That seems reasonable and I'll take your word for it. In practice, then, an MP3 frame is about 1/80th of a second (41,000 samples/sec / 512 samples/frame ~= 80 frames/second)? If so, a completely empty extra frame between two tracks would inject 12ms of silence between songs. Is that noticeable enough to be an issue?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
One big reason I use VLC as my usual media player: it has decent pitch control / speed control built in. So, I can listen to podcasts or audiobooks a bit faster, and yank back a few minutes of time.
Also good for guilty pleasures like sit-coms; much nicer to watch The Big Bang Theory in 17 minutes instead of 22. (And if I could find versions with the laugh-track missing, I think it might be down to about 9 ...)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I agree, that's one of the reasons I love mplayer for audio/video.
I just feed it with data and mplayer plays it, it doesn't get in my way with stupid GUIs.