My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 5, 2006 13:15 UTC (Wed) by thomasvs (guest, #36955)
In reply to: My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com) by jwb
Parent article: My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com)

Hi,

two questions:

a) Could you elaborate on "there is basically no way to report useful error messages back to the user (or even back to the program)" ?

There are a number of programs that do this just fine with the given API. Take for example this Flumotion screenshot: http://www.flumotion.net/images/flu-error.png

I'm interested in knowing if there really is a problem here.

b) Did you know there are at least two different ways to just get at the raw samples ? There are buffer probe callbacks - triggered for every buffer passing through a pad - and there is a fakesink element with a handoff signal that can give you every buffer.

I'm also confused by what you said about adding a MusicIP feature. I don't know what MusicIP is, but basically you are saying that you would have preferred to add this particular feature *three times* for each player, over just implementing this once as an element and then simply using it from each player. I am assuming MusicIP is something that, like musicbrainz, does some fingerprinting of the audio data and then generates some ID from that.

GStreamer 0.8 has a trm element that works just fine, and could easily be used as a basis for your MusicIP element. To be honest, I don't think that whatever you are trying to do would take much work. But you seem to only want to hack on one layer - the player. I can understand that, but in reality these days if you're only ever going to hack on one layer of the cake, you're probably not going to end up solving any real user problems.

Lastly, communication is key. You could mail the GStreamer mailing list with your questions, or drop by on IRC and ask around. We're a friendly bunch and it wouldn't have been hard to help you out.

Hope that helps.

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