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XMMS Plugin Competition
Olle Hällnäs writes "XMMS team is proud to announce a plugin competiton with prizes.
The competition will be held between the 10th of November and will run until the 10th of December. The XMMS team has also releaseed a QSound iQ Effect plugin for XMMS - more details are online, along with a press release. "
with all the cool winamp plugins out there this should hopefully get xmms some cool plugins. For one of my friends xmms maybe a killer app to let him move to linux. He's one of those people who obessses over mp3s. this would make it easier for him and others to move to linux.
.sig
matisse:~$ cat
I think it's a good thing that XMMS got a sponsor for their contest so they could give away some prizes. However, the whole XMMS contest reminds me of the recent Loki Hack contest - with one major difference: Loki's games weren't open source.
My question is this: Should an open source project need something like a contest to get people to develop? My understanding of open-source projects is that those who are interested in contributing do so. That would lead me to the conclusion that nobody would enter the contest that wasn't already contributing to XMMS. Say, for instance, someone who was previously contributing to XMMS wins the contest and gets a prize. Does this person go on to code for free, forgetting the momentary gain? Perhaps - I'd like to think I would. Of course, I might also just go out and look for another contest to get prizes from. After all, I'm still contributing to open source, just not XMMS anymore.
What does everyone else think? Is this a trend in 'commercializing' (as far as such a thing is possible) open source, or just an innocent contest blown a bit out of proportion?
-Denor
We will NEVER charge for XMMS.. The reason we charge for the plugin is the fact that we licensed the stuff from QSound. Peter Alm (peter@xmms.org)
I can see it now. Pipe the spectrum analyzer into GLWolfenstein.
Your actions are now dependent on the audio you're playing. Spikes in intensity result in gunfire, changes in frequency alter direction (notes go down, view goes left), and tempo determines speed of movement.
Just think...playing 'The Who' might actually get you through a level!
So to sum up what hundereds of poor would be plugin writers have asked in the past...
Where's the docs? How about a plugin tutorial/guide? (in xmms's defense I just checked out winamp's page where it states: "COMING SOON: Plug-in tutorial")
I would bet that there are a number of people out there excited about the contest, but are missing the basic information to give their learning curve a swift kick in the @$$.
There is limited time for this contest when you toss in school and work, and that time is much shorter still if we have to go decipher the xmms code base... The plugin.h file linked from the contest page won't cut it. An architecture doc would be excellent.
For example allow me explain a problem I had the other week. (begin whining...)
Say I want to run multiple xmms sessions that are outputing to a software pcm mixer (esound, dbfsd, whichever you choose), and you want each xmms session to control its own output volume. The math is easy. As the input cojmes into the plugin, adjust the sample amplitude by some percentage. But, due to output buffering etc, the volume change becomes audible after a 3-4 second delay. Ideally the change should be immeadiate. Going through someone elses code to derive the architecture behind what is occuring is painful and time consuming...
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
"It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
I think it'd be hard. Not only do you have the windows/linux transation, but you also have the ways that xmms talks to plugins vs the ways winamp does.
Not gonna happen soon, I think.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
- Full duplex support on all cards
- Built in PNP support (runs my AWE64 without ever messing with ISAPNP, unlike OSS)
- Quad speaker support
- Multiple card support (I run a Trident 4DWave and an AWE64 in my system, and both work great)
- Multiple applications opening the same sound device simultaneously (with a card that supports this in hardware)
- Better organization and more configurability - save and restore all your settings for all your cards in one command line
The only things going for OSS now is a slight edge in the number of cards supported. When this is dealt with, I'm all for ditching OSS and moving to ALSA. If you're card is supported by ALSA, try it out - I guarantee you'll like it.It is cool that OSS is supporting the contest though - community support in any form is always nice.
When I hear the word XMMS I think of mp3 player but I've always used GQMpeg even back when XMMS was still called X11Amp. Sound playback is a pretty basic thing which can be accomplished by hundreds of programs without much issue. It's, well, an mp3 player that, well, plays mp3s. It seems like 4front Technologies is putting a lot of money into this program to turn it into the all-in-one solution for audio but I've yet to see any reason to use it for anything.
There is already a free "enhance stereo" (or something) effect plugin that comes with xmms. It works really well, and I like it a lot.
Has anyone used the two for comparison purposes? I don't see why the iQ plugin could be so much better that it's worth $10?
(I'm at work now on an SGI, and I can't get xmms to compile, or else I'd try...)
I got razzed in Efnet's #linux chatroom a few days ago for bringing this up, but now seems like the perfect time to say it (and kinda eerily concidental).
There's a plugin for Winamp called DFX. It adds psuedo- hi fidelity sound to MP3 playback. It's demoware in Win9x, but let me just be the first person to say this -- it is INCREDIBLE. The bigger the stereo system, the better it sounds, but it even sounds great on headphones. How about something similar to this for XMMS? If it's done well, it's an almost sure-fire win.
Note: I can't program, or else I'd be one of the first people trying to do this ^_^. Also, for those who want to check out DFX, it's at www.fxsound.com
I'm seriously hoping something BETTER than DFX can be created for linux. OpenGL / Spectrum Analysis / Visual plugins are cool, but you're not listening to music to watch some wavy effects.
Check out This. I hate it when contests act like what they're giving you such a big deal. Value $120 my butt... $40 in 4front software(that actually costs them nothing to distrubate, I'm not saying it's wrong of them to charge, just giving it out in a contest costs them _very_ little.), and a $80 soundcard that's really $18? Heh. I love xmms, and I'm looking forward to the plugins this will bring, but please don't lie to get people participate in contests.
To the other person who said they wanted a plugin to broadcast icecast streams.. uhh that's pretty ridiculous.
/. effect...]
Having recently set up an icecast server, I think I know what that other guy is talking about. I think he was looking for some way to use XMMS as a more "user friendly" front end to produce an MP3 audio stream for icecast.
As it is right now, actually producing the audio stream for icecast to serve out to the world is something of a black art (IMO).
Your 3 choices are:
First option - shout: Easiest to get running, but less flexible. It only allows you to stream your MP3s at the same bitrate they were encoded at. In other words, no real-time re-encoding.
If you want to stream the same audio at several bitrates (to give people with slower connections an option of lower quality but less skipping), you need to be able to re-encode the MP3 data on the fly. You also need re-time re-encoding if your source MP3s were encoded at different bitrates and you want to give one consistent bitrate for your stream. (this would be a good idea, since some players get out of sync if you change the bitrate within the stream)
Second option - liveice: Much more flexible but a bear to set up. It allows you to re-encode real time, and manipulate the playlist, mix tracks together, and do more of the things you hear on over the air radio.
The complexity comes from the "modular" nature of the software. There are license restrictions on the MP3 encoding algorithm, so there can't legally be any GPL encoders. This means that Scott Manley can't include MP3 encoding code directly in his program. He has to rely on the encoding coming from an external source, such as a commercial encoding package like Xing or from one of the "underground" packages like LAME that are simple wrappers around the unoptimized MP3 reference encoder.
Since most people doing icecast servers want to keep things open source, they aren't very well going to pay hundreds of dollars for a commercial encoder. That leaves the "underground" packages.
There are several packages available for Linux to encode MP3, but the stability, audio quality, and program interface varies widely among them. Scott usually has a tough task getting his code and somebody else's to play nice.
I had such a difficult and unreliable experience trying to get an encoder to run, produce decent sound, and not crash with liveice that I eventually abandoned it and used shout. I manually re-encoded my MP3s at 24kbps and I just stream them statically. They say doing that usually produces better audio quality anyway.
BTW, I'm fully prepared to concede my inablility to get liveice running stems from my own incompetence and NOT from flaws in Linux or mistakes of the icecast developers. YMMV...
Third option - Winamp with DSP Plugin: Believe it or not, there are people who keep a Windoze machine around just to produce a stream to the icecast server.
For all it's shortcomings, M$ has done one nice thing in its life and that is pay for a distribution licence for the Fraunhofer MP3 codec. Fraunhofer is acknowledged to be the most efficient, stable, and best sounding MP3 codec around. M$ included it in the Windows Media Player server tools/authoring package which you can download for free.
What you do is, you get that MS package, winamp, and a Shoutcast DSP plugin that re-directs the MP3 output to an IP address/port you specify, and configure the bitrate and audio quality all from a nice user friendly dialog box. Then you load up your winamp playlists and you are "on the air", with less hassle than liveice. (unless you consider rebooting a crashing Doze box every few hours or days a hassle...)
So what I think the other guy was looking for is some way to make XMMS give similar functionality and user-friendliness to what winamp provides under the windows platform, except provide it with the stability and performace of linux, and license it under the GPL.
I think the functionality can certainly be written by somebody, we have a lot of real smart developers in the open source world and XMMS/icecast in particular. The tough nut is going to be a high quality, free MP3 encoder.
The best option would be a freely distributable version of the Fraunhofer encoder for Linux. This could actaully be done, the only barrier is money. It costs MEGABUCKS (several thousands) for a distribution license from Fraunhofer, and the result would not be possible to put under GPL since the algorithm iself has license and NDA restrictions. So the best we could do is get a binary only encoder that would only run on whatever distribution and platform it was compiled for, and we'd have to find a charitible sugar daddy to pay for the license. And we would still have to hold our noses and accept a non-GPL solution.
BTW, if anybody cares, my icecast server is online at http://24.5.234.110:8000. I have several hours worth of Dave Matthews Band live show bootlegs up there. If you're a DMB fan, giv it a listen sometime. [/me hunkers down for the
-James
I have a little theory. In all the hurry what happened to the pc speaker? I have always thought that someone who has much more education than me could code something that would approximate a random sampling of the music then translate the sound to notes and then produce the notes at a specific frequency on the pc speaker. There is a kernel patch that allows .wav's to be kind of send through the speaker in a garbled manner but it dosn't work too good. I have an hp48g calculator and it can produce entire symphonies (Bach I believe) from the sound in the speaker. A remember a program for dos that had files that could create whole songs and the like from the pc speaker but this stuff is conspiciously(sp) absent in linux which should be able to do more.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I just bought and downloaded QSound Plugin for XMMS and it rox. Does what that DFX plugin does and it's for XMMS for Linux.
Perhaps it's my shoddy soundcard (a Yamaha OPL3SA-2 based card), but I really can't hear anything that great from the "Extra Stereo" plugin and the iQ QSound plugin. I have Altec Lansing ACS44 Speakers (nothing spectacularly great, but sure beats the Rat-Shack tin cans I was using for a while). The QBass makes the bass obscenely large and overpowers the rest of the music. I like some bass, but I'm not one of those people who cranks up the subwoofer all the way. It just sounds ridiculous. With the "Extra Stereo" plugin it does the opposite, and makes the high-end way too overpowering.
I have my two cube speakers about 2 feet in each direction on both sides of my desk, with my subwoofer about 2 feet to my back right, chair in the middle of all of it. I'm not getting any "spatial" effects off either of these plugins. I'm probably "too close" to the speakers to hear that magical third channel which my brains supposed to register as being behind me (not going to happen). They both seem to just muck with the equalizer a little, pump up the high-end and low-end a decibel or two and introduce some echo. Is this supposed to sound "good"?. A friend of mine has a true 4 speaker setup, and this just simply doesn't compare, or even come close - even at $10 or free.
Granted i have not tried alsa yet... But I didn't see any reason too.
Last month I shelled out $30 for the OSS license and driver (20 for the base licencse, 10 for each card...)
I ran their install program, it autodetected both my ISA and PCI soundcards. Quite possibly the most(least?) painless of my linux experiences.
As a DJ, I have found their code to be solid and robust when it comes to running and mixing 4+ audio players for over 6 hours at a time. No problems whatsoever.
I look at it this way. Sound support for *nix is what these guys do for a living, nearly every day, of every week, of every year. They were the ones to release Linux sound support years before alsa was a twinkle in someone's eye.
They might not be open source, but they do support a free version of their Intellectual Property, and also monetarially support opensource projects. There's a lot of talk about how to get funding for beneficial opensource projects, and how to get people working on opensource full time. I did my part by sending these boys a check. Monetarially, there's more invested in the rotting leftovers in my fridge.
Honestly, what's $30 compared to the amount you'll spend on computer parts/upgrades/etc over the next two years? You can't get a good game for that amount of money. I found the cost negligable.
As a developer, their API is simple and cross platform. I wrote my own wrappers for it in under an hour, and haven't had need to change them since. Personally, reading the ALSA api makes my eyes hurt.
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
"It was like trying to herd cats..." - Robert A. Heinlein
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
AlsaPlayer is a varispeed mp3 player. It can even play mp3's backwards at variable speed. A quick hack on that would make an excellent DJ mp3 player. It can also play CDs forwards and backwards at anyspeed. Its an excellent package.
I know how to win! How about a plugin to monitor a user's listening habits, and transparently send that information back to a central site that can keep a big database of all user's listening habits?
Why should the commercial people have all of the fun of selling purloined user information? I think it's about time that the open source community got in on the action!
So that's my proposal: the Open Source User Exploitation (OSUE) plugin. Let's act like all those "professionals" out there at commercial software companies!
Here here!! I paid for a Forefront license as well. I'm not saying this to show off but this rampant IT MUST BE FREE OR ITS CRAP is just stupid and uneducated.
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