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XMMS Plugin Competition

Posted by Hemos on from the makin'-things-look-pretty dept.

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. "

5 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Re:how long till they charge for xmms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4

    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)

  2. The eternal xmms plugin question... by Capt+Dan · · Score: 4

    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.
  3. OSS as prizes? by bbk · · Score: 4
    Not to burst any bubbles, but OSS isn't that great of a thing... It isn't free, and the free version that is in the kernel has a lot of features removed. I use ALSA for my sound support, and it can do so much more stuff than OSS, such as:
    • 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.

  4. Re:XMMS | GLWolfenstein by Mr_Plow · · Score: 3

    Interestingly enough, reminds me of a project we never finished but should have. A friend of mine and I bought a program called Super Collider, a real-time synthesis engine for the Mac. It's totally programmable (kind of like CSound on crack) and can interpret MIDI data and mouse movements. We tried to get it to run with Doom II. We programmed it to accept keyboard and mouse input and to change timbre and tempo based on the frequency of the input (interpret mouse click as firing a weapon, assume that increased firing means increase in play intesity.) The program could accept the input even in the background. We just never got the music to seamlessly change tempos or timbres. Sounded too choppy.
    ----------------------------------------- -----------------

  5. in response, my OSS views... by Capt+Dan · · Score: 3

    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.