Home Page Forums Other Emulator Message Boards Audio Overload Not quite AO, but...

Regarding GStreamer vs. Xine. Dunno how good GStreamer has become, but everytime I compared, I found Xine the more robust and flexible and compatible backend. After all, it's up to you guys whether or not to use them. But it would really rock if you did

Anyway, I found a pretty interesting discussion in the bsnes forums about how to circumvent GPL rules and stuff. Let the user "opt in". That way the GPL'ed code gets inserted during runtime because of a configuration file modified by the user, not by the developer. Simply ask on first start about whether or not to include some of the problematic drivers (and of course leave the checkboxes blank ). That area seems a little gray, but I think that way you could legally enable AO to make use of your vio2sf port and of course the PEOpS SPU core (I wonder why you never had problems with the GPL status of that one).

Actually many distributions are doing this already - the other way round. Ubuntu with its Restricted Modules packages, for example. The distro may SHIP with them, but the user has to INSTALL them manually.

I have permission from Pete to use the PEOpS cores without following GPL.

I don't think the bsnes methods would stand up in court given that the code would be present in the executable either way. The only reliable way to avoid it is to have a general plugin interface and supply all your engines as plugins (which I think is actually a good idea for AO 2.5 or 3.0 or whatever for several reasons).

I'm not familiar with Ubuntu's specific setup, but for Fedora the "dirty stuff" (ie LAME and other MPEG/MP3 software plus the NV/ATI binary drivers) is actually in a completely separate repository outside of the US that isn't run by anyone from Red Hat, and nothing in the base distro points you to it. That way it's 100% certain it was the user's choice to add it to their yum list :-)

Well, in Ubuntu you gotta enable that repository manually, but it's still maintained by the Masters of the Universe (MOTU). Dunno about the connection to Canonical, though. Still, this repository is present on every mirror.

Oh, and the "really dirty" stuff (e.g. libdvdcss2) is of course not in any official repo.

PS: AO Linux now automatically plays the next song when a song ends, just like the other 2. It's playing through the Parasite Eve OST in the background as I type this

didn't look like my Kubuntu was shipped with them, had to apt-get the restricted stuff, while my Mepis has everything from flash to mp3s working by default - and it's a US distro.

this forum has too many important projects i use frequently to abandon - gaps in discussion can come from totally random stuff and the fact that we're on the opposite sides of Earth.

1) i think the most important thing i would like to see is a way to make WAVs of NSF tracks other than the first one because currently (2.0b10 test 2) neither using "Jump to" or clicking "Next" seem to actually export anything, but they do show "L" (i wrote this into the "test 1" thread too, along with suggestions about looping VGMs)

i think it can be a lot of work to make AO a good general usage player and your skills & time could be put into better use with other projects, because like i posted earlier: imo even "audio players" like Xmms & Audacious fall short in the level of usability of Foobar2000 & Amarok - this is also why we started talking about making the plugins for the backends, to finally allow Linux users to enjoy seamless chiptune action... i had that idea years ago, but i didn't have an account here and also thought if AO hasn't already been made to work from Amarok then there's a reason - didn't know you were using some ultra comfortable CLI debug version and no one else brought it up

trouble is, many chiptune artists like 047 & Phlogiston release their music in audio formats but i love them and like to keep them in the same playlist as chiptune format tracks from artists like Estrayk & Funky Fish along with video game composers.

but my ideas to get better chiptune playing experience from AO:
2) automatic continous playlist repeat & shuffle function that also shuffles inside NSF files
3) ability to set looping or play time for different formats - eg. right now each NSF track plays indefinitely, default time for SPC gives it roughly 2 loops with a fadeout while VGM plays one loop and stops.
4) ability to save & optionally automatically resume playlist playback

these would give us the ability to make nice chiptune playlists, which could get loaded on AO launch and start playing automagically - AO would then shuffle around if the chosen timeframe (or loopcount for certain formats) ends, so it would play without needing maintenance

my x64 2.0b10 test 2 doesn't yet - rechecked just now with Sonic 3 OST in VGM so "test 3" i take?

Now means literally "on my machine", there's not a posted version that does it yet. I'm still working on allowing multiple selections in the File Open box, and I just fixed VGM to take the standard 2 loops instead of 1 + stop.

After looking at the documentation I'm not sure it's possible to do VGM plugins in xine. It's nowhere near as flexible as Gstreamer, and the fact that no VGM-style plugins exist yet isn't a good sign. (Gstreamer has NSF and MikMod plugins in the standard package).

and then onto the next track

would AO plugins for either Xine or GStreamer give you the ability to tune each format, say inside some Amarok settings submenu?

because:
5) more tuning options for AO
imo the best thing about AO is the ability to turn off sound channels & mix away
but there are other ways to interact with chiptunes that's not possible with audio - many Foobar2000 & Winamp plugins have options to tinker with, tho i didn't like how its NSF playback sounded compared to Festalon & AO, NotSo Fatso had nice tuning options; for MOD & XM, XMPlay was also sweet with low pass filters, various tracker playback styles & multichannel mixing - would these be difficult to implement?

AFAIK neither plugin option would give you any tuning ability at all - there's no standard way in either format to expose that sort of thing that I'm aware of.

Adding per-file-format (and possibly per-file-instance) "knobs" is something we're definitely interested in for AO. Those sorts of things are honestly why dedicated VGM players are better for VGM.

Perhaps instead of adding VGM to audio players we should add audio to AO? MP3 at least would be trivial.

sure, i did mean the tuning options mostly for AO, just wondered about their possibility for Linux audio players.

uh oh! the things Amarok does for me atm:
- mp3, ogg vorbis, flac (don't need more than flac because soundKonverter can convert other lossless formats to flac)
- internet radio (eg. http://www.kohina.com/ )
- checks & updates the music collection from my /music folder
- lists the genres of my music collection and allows to load or append them to the playlist (most important imo, depending on the mood, i would load up eg. Eurodance, Chiptunes, Jungle or say House music)
- really really great interface & playlist with easy metadata editing and sorting by it (they changed it into something narrow, horrid & album based for 2.0 but promised to keep the classic one)
- displays a nice announcer overlay every time the track changes (not that important, but nice)
- sys tray & qt (i know it's a tiring subject but apart from Firefox, most progressive apps like even the new VLC use QT instead of GTK - it could also allow you to make one cross platform version together with Mr Bannister, the only problem seems to be that its awesomeness is only free for FOSS projects)

other functions i don't really use, so with these (and maybe M1 too) in AO i wouldn't need any other player in my system and i bet i'm not alone

but that's hella work and i think those 5 features in my previous posts are more urgent than even audio... i wonder, with Amarok being FOSS - couldn't one mix'n'match the features they like into their own projects as long as they keep it FOSS and include the original sauce? They're pretty much dumping the great classic playlist - would be nice if they sourced it separately which you could then comfortably pick up for AO?

This insistence on putting the 12-sided peg of VGM/chiptunes into the square hole of Winamp is exactly why VGM is currently an unsatisfactory experience. People need to understand that VGM/chiptunes are different and need to be handled differently. This "all in one or else" mentality is exactly the opposite of the Unix philosophy (although it explains Windows Vista to a stunning level of detail ;-)

Put another way: you wouldn't use Inkscape for photo touchups and you wouldn't use GIMP to create vector art, even though they're both images. VGM's the same way - it's like vector art, where you *can* turn it into a bitmap (wav/mp3/ogg/flac) but you lose a lot of control and potential flexibility if you do.