X11AMP changes name to XMMS and gets sponsored

Crocodile writes "X11AMP chaned name to XMMS (X MultiMedia System) and is now sponsored by 4Front Technologies Read more about it in the press release. You can download xmms .9 final as well. "

Comments

4Front's Response (long)

[4front]

Hi,

Here's the one and only message you'll get from 4Front and you can decide for yourself.

4Front is basically just two people: Hannu Savolainen and Dev Mazumdar (myself). Hannu is the
author of OSS/Free which is 100% GPL'ed. We gave p lucerative "DAY JOBS", me at IBM and Hannu at an engineering company in Finland. Today, we are making less that what we can be making if we
were working at day jobs and we are decent Linux programmers. We really like what we do - developing OSS drivers for Linux/UNIX.

Crocodile, Fatal and Peter are good friends of ours and they are "poor" guys and don't even make
any signficant money. X11amp was stagnating because these guys were busy doing other things so I offered them some money to basically get them motivated to work full time on XMMS. Nobody who downloaded X11amp has offered a plug nickel to these guys!. We stepped up to the plate, and offered them a small token from our meager earnings. We each make less than $60,000 a year - we're not Redhat or VA with millions!. We work damn hard at supporting our customers and who else gives you a product for $20-$30 with free tech support for 2 years and free upgrades for 3 years?. Not Redhat, not Microsoft, not IBM,not Corel and not Caldera, not SuSE, Not Corel. Which two-man company have you seen that can support so many different soundcards, so many different OSs and keep up with the pace of Linux kernel releases?

If you care to see what our customers are saying, visit http://www.opensound.com/guest.html
I can also share with you what our customers are raving about our tech support (email me!)

So now that these guys have joined 4Front, are you going to deny them the right to earn a living????
BTW, Crocodile makes some money selling OSS/Linux licenses in Sweden and all the proceeds go to him, Peter and Fatal.

The number of contributed plugins aren't coming in at the rate at which some of the Winamp or other Windows plugins are coming (says that OpenSource isn't up to keeping pace with Windows in the media dept).

So basically, yes, we are interested in getting XMMS working on all the versions of UNIX we support in OSS (besides Linux) but guys, OSS/Free is GPL, XMMS is GPL.

WHAT PART OF GPL DO YOU NOT GET?.

Go ahead and modify OSS/Free and XMMS all you want. Infact, we'd be too happy if you contributed any improvements to either one.

As for ALSA, we don't know if we can support it since ALSA's asound.h is GPL'ed which means that there can be no "closed sourced" application development. If Linus makes ALSA the standard driver in the kernel, so be it. We'll probably shutdown OSS for Linux and concentrate on other UNIX systems. In anycase, DO NOT CONFUSE OSS/Free and OSS/Linux. The commercial OSS drivers are waaay ahead of OSS/Free - Virtual Mixer, shadow devices for full duplex, more number of sound cards and a working ESS Solo-1/Maestro driver - we used the same docs available to everybody else - neither the ALSA nor OSS/Free have it working - we do!

We have no beef with ALSA guys, we wish them well and perhaps there's enough room in Linux for both APIs - we have never said anything derogatory to ALSA - while they continue to spread FUD about OSS - like no new technologies no new development. All I can say is you ain't seen what we've done with OSS for some of our customers who pay for our services to customise OSS. Here's a small sampling of our successes:

- OSS is used at a defence contractor building helicopter simulations using OSS with Terratec EWS64 soundcards with full DREAM 9407 working with 4 channel surround sound - but that driver isn't for sale to the general public!.

- OSS is used by Marquette Medical systems to build patient monitoring systems using VxWorks.

- OSS is used by Lockheed martin to build voice recognition systems for the next generation of battle tanks.

- OSS is used by Broardcast.com, ZDTV, and by the US Govt and yes, including Microsoft!!!!

- 4Front has donated OSS to the East Palo Alto Inner City Development Center for educating inner city youths.

- 4Front has donated free OSS licenses to all the major Linux audio developers - Alan Cox, Dave Phillips (Linux audio apps website), Sam Lantiga (SDL/Loki) Even some of the ALSA developers like P.J Leonard, all the KDE developers, all the FreeBSD developers. Luminaries like David Korn. Plus we're helping iD Software with Quake3 (see Zoid's .plan).

So the question is are we a Microsoft? Anybody can write a driver - we stepped in and tried to do the right thing, and now that we're making a few bucks (less than what Linus makes, and out of that we're giving some to the XMMS guys) and you're accusing us of Microsoft like tactics?.

I just want to say that if you like OSS/Linux, buy it and you'll be a happy customer, if you absolutely hate our guts, use ALSA or OSS/Free or why not write a driver under Joe's Sound System?. Also please explain why are OSS licenses being hotly pirated on irc if it totally sucked? - obviously we're doing something right!

4Front has been one of the first software companies developing for Linux and gpl'ing our products (we did give away SoftOSS, Yamaha OPL3-SAx and fixed up certain other drivers in OSS/Freee). Why are people so dead against us and not others like Perl, Cygnus, Scriptics, Sendmail - these apps are essential services for Linux and still they are "closed source products".????.
If you think 4Front is a monopoly, so is Sendmail, so is Scriptics, so is every stinking successful Linux company - Redhat/SuSE/VA/Caldera/PHT. You have a choice - OSS/Linux or OSS/Free or ALSA or Roll-your-own sound driver (like Corel Netwinder, EMPeg, etc)!.

BTW, PLEASE BUY the JULY ISSUE OF Linux Journal, you'll read about our philosophy in an interview by Dave Phillips. A shameless plug at last :) (disclaimer: we're not making any money of LJ sales!)

Best regards
Dev Mazumdar

Underwater sounds (Re:GQmpeg

[dmorin]

mpg123 would give him the clicks and underwater sounds. Sorry for the offtopic, but what the hell is this? I've tried ripping my own MP3s at home and I always end up with this. I tried several different players, several different cds, on Linux, Windows and my Rio. The only reason I could come up with is that the speed of my machine had something to do with it? It's a P166. Somebody want to suggest the combination of software I can use to rip MP3s on my Redhat5.1 box?

Suspicious

[tgd]

Anyone else other than me see this as a microsoft-like tactic to keep 4Front's relavence in the marketplace for their OpenSound system? With some of the talk kicking around about the base sound support in Linux 2.3 changing over to ALSA (a far superior -- and free -- system IMHO), maybe they just want to try to keep control of things.

Maybe someone should submit patches to XMMS giving it native ALSA support...

Re:Suspicious

[tgd]

And its not now. In fact it specifically says that XMMS is best used with OSS or an OSS-compatible sound system. I could be mistaken, but I don't remember that being there before.

And in response to the other reply mentioning it being a good business tactic, I don't think it really is. A good business tactic, in my book, is doing everything you can to make your product the best one available. 4Front has never really been a company like that -- I've never had anything but trouble with their software, whereas when I decided nine months or so ago to switch my systems to the ALSA driver the only complexity I had was getting rid of OSS/Free.

Its definately a Microsoft tactic to do something else to push focus on your software when a potential competitor is doing a better job creating a similar product.

I downloaded the source for XMMS. I think its a perfect example that I got the ESD support, the Gnome support and the software in there, but not the ALSA support.

I think my point was a legitimate one. If the ALSA support is buggy, why wouldn't the developers try to fix it. Bet that won't happen now.

Re:Suspicious

[Chris Pimlott]

Yes, but that plugin is made by another person not associated with X11amp (now xmms). It's not as if X11amp has been supporting ALSA this whole time. An important clarification, methinks.

Re:Suspicious

[Lface]

> Maybe someone should submit patches to XMMS giving it native ALSA support...

x11amp, no wait, xmms uses a plugin-architecture. There has been a ALSA-plugin available for some time now. The reasons that it has not been included in the official distribution yet is as far as I know:
1. The ALSA-plugin has been a bit buggy. (I have not tested the latest version though)
2. The ALSA API has changed recently.

If you want this plugin you can check: http://server.bohemians.org/~iznogood/

This used to be linked from the old x11amp-homepage.

*PLUG* *PLUG*

[Adnans]

Anyone like to support AlsaPlayer?

Hehe ;-)

GQmpeg

[DaKrushr]

How come nobody seems to know about this great MP3 player?

It's been GPL'd for ages - has really nice skin support (including shaped skins), is fast, doesn't crash, and is just generally cool - and it isn't a copy of a Windows program :).

GQmpeg/GQview

Re:GQmpeg

[Straker Skunk]

GQmpeg is nice, although it does have some issues with the frontend-to-mpg123 interface; namely, you start to hear MP3's about a half-second after they begin, and sometimes the buttons go dead for whatever odd reason. X11Amp didn't have at least the first problem when I tried it, IIRC . . .

Another one to mention is FreeAmp. It's also GPL'ed (sponsored by GoodNoise even), and has its own built-in decoder engine. A few ppl here mentioned Nitrane-- well, check this puppy out. It has a superhyperoptimized 128Kbps decoder: whereas mpg123 uses ~8-9% of my K6-2 300, freeamp uses just 0.1% (assuming top ain't lying). It should be even better now, now that NASM 0.98's been released . . .

Re:GQmpeg

[dmv]

GQmpeg actually does look rather nice. It looks motivating enough for me to perhaps customize a skin as well.

I will note something in favor of X11Amp, though. I was converting a person a couple of weeks ago to linux. He was going to linux from windows because he liked how I made X look, he was very much into aesthetics, and he figured he would do well to know unix.

His only requirements was the ability to listen to MP3s - its predominantly what he does at home without his .edu bandwidth. After installing the system though, we discovered that his (sizeable) mp3 collection was mostly corrupted - the kind of thing when downloading from http with a misconfig'd webserver. mpg123 would give him the clicks and underwater sounds. He had never noticed these things under windows/winamp.

Apparently winamp does on the fly repairing.

So does X11amp, which made him, and me, happy. Because CQmpeg relies on mpg123, that's something which is apparently significant which it lacks.

From www.nullsoft.com

[Andy Dodd]

In the listing of features from Winamp 2.23 (latest ver.)

Nitrane 1.60 MPEG audio decoder with MMX and 3DNow! acceleration

Nope. You might be thinking of encoders - Many people consider the Fraunhofer encoder to have the best quality for 160kbps compression. Many people also don't give a damn and use another encoder because they hate Fraunhofer. (The 160k figure comes from the BladeEnc page, I think - the author of BladeEnce optimizes for higher bitrates, and states that the quality crossover occurs around ~160k.

Re:I thought x11amp was a great name.

[nitsuj]

With yesterdays ALSA post, it now seems like OSS free isn't dead and not without support. So if ALSA is going to win any distribution space it is going to have to earn it. Still it would be nice if these guys could work together.

Don't worry about ALSA. It will be the sound architecture in 2.3 and later kernels. OSS modules will still work of course, but if ALSA has support for your card, you want to run it. It's vastly superior.

Furthermore, the notion that 4Front is going to make XMMS use special OSS extensions is ridiculous. Have any of you ever looked at the OSS API? It's remarkably simple and going nowhere. Don't expect OSS to support >2 channel sound output or hardware processing (such as 3D) anytime soon. The ALSA interface is currently being designed to allow these things in the future. And right now, it already emulates most (if not all) of the OSS API.

4Front might have a future writing and selling proprietary ALSA modules (as well as OSS for other unices), but OSS on Linux isn't going to be around much past Linux 2.4.

drat! upgrade conflict!

[mrjinks]

Nuts. I tried to install this version, but it requires versions of gtk+ and glib that are newer than RedHat 6 -- no biggie, go to the GNOME site and -- whoah, they're not there either.

I am really bugged by the fact that GNOME stuff seems to proliferate so irregularly. Where is everybody else going to get all this up-to-date software that I can never find?