The XMMS2 "Dr. Doolittle" release

[Posted March 29, 2006 by cook]

Version 0.1DR2.2 of XMMS2, the X(cross)platform Music Multiplexing System, was announced this week. The project is still in the early stages of development.

This release is forged by the wormholes of Stargate, Swedish schlager music, Chilean beaches and a lament for a loved one. DrDoolittle is a minor-feature-addition and bug-fix release instead of the expected major-break-the-world release. We decided that enough critical fixes and small features were available to make a release. You can watch the new Roadmap in order to see what's going on with future releases.

XMMS2 is a redesign of XMMS, the popular X Multimedia System music player.

XMMS2 is a redesign of the XMMS (http://www.xmms.org) music player. It features a client-server model, allowing multiple (even simultaneous!) user interfaces, both textual and graphical. All common audio formats are supported using plugins. On top of this, there is a flexible media library to organize your music.

Your editor, who only recently started using XMMS, decided to see what XMMS2 had to offer. A handy Ubuntu "Breezy Badger" package set was available for download. The XMMS2 and dependent packages installed with no trouble. Firing up xmms2 for the first time yielded some mysterious error messages. A little digging around on the XMMS2 web site yielded the Using the application document, which showed the way to making xmms2 work. It is first necessary to fire up xmms2d, the xmms2 daemon, before running xmms2.

Unlike the old XMMS GUI, xmms2 is a simple command line tool. Running xmms2 yields a list of possible command line options. One must first select a file or top-level directory where the audio files reside. The xmms2 radd directory command, followed by xmms2 play started the player. The xmms2 next command aborts playing of the current track and moves to the next one. The xmms2 stop commands stops playing and xmms2 quit shuts down the xmms2d process.

The basic installation works fine with .wav files, but an attempt to install the xmms2-flac decoder produced a dependency error. It seems that libflac6 is required by XMMS2, but the Synaptic package manager reports that the package is uninstallable.

The command line interface is sufficient for basic testing, but leaves the user wanting a GUI. There is a long list of GUI clients available, but none were included with the basic XMMS2 packages. At this point, XMMS2 is currently not an exact replacement for XMMS.

XMMS2 can perform the basic music playing function, but it is still a bit early in its development to consider it prime-time software. Your editor is looking forward to future developments on the project.

The XMMS2 "Dr. Doolittle" release

Posted Mar 30, 2006 2:07 UTC (Thu) by tru (guest, #30161) [Link] (6 responses)

Hello!

Thanks for the coverage! Let me just comment a bit on the article.

XMMS2 is still in DR (Developer Release) phase which means that we don't have everything ready for the end users, just as our editor noted. But that said I must say that we have a lot of not so visible features implemented that makes XMMS2 a very flexible ground to build music applications on. The medialib is based on SQLite which makes it scalable and easy to query information.

Consider this:

# add music to the medialib
xmms2 mlib addpath ~/Music
# add everything from dismantled to the playlist
xmms2 mlib searchadd artist=Dismantled
# add all songs that contains "exit" in the title to the list
xmms2 mlib searchadd title=%exit%

Also the rich set of clientbindings is one of XMMS2 features. Today we have bindings for: C, Java, Python, Ruby. Clients can be full blown applications or smaller clients that manipulate the playlist.

I agree that XMMS2 isn't ready for prime-time yet, but it's very interesting for people that wants to explore alternative ways of playing music and handle your collection.

Oh, and we didn't compile the .debs for breezy directly that's why you got a dependency error. We uploaded Dapper Drake debs today.

Go check it out and come with comments!

The XMMS2 "Dr. Doolittle" release

Posted Mar 30, 2006 2:09 UTC (Thu) by tru (guest, #30161) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh, and we are looking for someone that can help us get our debs into unstable :-)

The XMMS2 "Dr. Doolittle" release

Posted Mar 30, 2006 8:44 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

You might want to give Florian Ragwitz a ping. According to Debian Bug #325709 he is working on packages, but the last update from him was from August 2005.

The XMMS2 "Dr. Doolittle" release

Posted Mar 30, 2006 9:36 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (3 responses)

I would be interested in the difference in design between xmms2 and mpd.

If at all possible, it would be a great thing to have a standardized
command set controlling these applications, so you could mix and match
front ends and back ends, leaving the room open for desktop distributions
to map the "next song" keys found on some keyboards so it worked with all
players.

The XMMS2 "Dr. Doolittle" release

Posted Mar 30, 2006 12:11 UTC (Thu) by djmutex (subscriber, #12657) [Link] (2 responses)

Me too. For those just tuning in, mpd is the Music Player Daemon, to whose feature set this XMMS2 thing sounds quite familiar. MPD is available at http://www.musicpd.org and there are already a ton of different frontends available.

My personal reason for using mpd instead of any GUI player is that 1) it keeps playing when X goes down and 2) it can actually do gapless playback, which is a must for me.

Would be nice to hear what problems the XMMS2 people see with mpd, if any.

The XMMS2 "Dr. Doolittle" release

Posted Mar 30, 2006 15:12 UTC (Thu) by tru (guest, #30161) [Link] (1 responses)

Since this is a common question we have a WIKI page prepared :-)
http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/index.php/XMMS2_vs_MPD

Just let me give the highlights:
* If you depend on gapless, wait for next release of XMMS2
* XMMS2 is a bit more advanced in it's structure / supporting notifications
* XMMS2 is under active developement (which is hard to say about mpd)

About protocol unification:
A MPD proxy client would be very easy to do. There is also a python framework for mpd/xmms2 communication. Chalyx http://eleusis.f2o.org/wp/category/software/xmms2/chalyx/

We are currently having discussions with audiolucious (and maybe BMP, but that's harder) about creating a unified interface for mediaplayers. We'll see how that turs out.

Enjoy.

The XMMS2 "Dr. Doolittle" release

Posted Mar 30, 2006 15:28 UTC (Thu) by tru (guest, #30161) [Link]

audacious is the correct name of the player. Sorry.