i was informed this week that the mailing list doesn't seem to be working, so i've setup Mailman and configured a gamp list. the links below have been updated, so please re-subscribe yourself if you were on the list before. as always, new members are welcome.
damn, it's been a hell of a long time since i updated this page, so i thought it was about time i put something. i've been working on the next release of gamp for a long time, and it's been "almost" ready for a really long time, but i never seem to find time to finish it off. i figured i'd throw my current pre-release online and see if i get any feedback. i dont make any guarantees, and there's probably some bugs, but feel free to report them if you find them. you can find the download below (gamp-1.1.0-pre21.tar.gz).
just thought i'd update people on where things stand. i havent actually had much time for development of gamp in the month since my last update, but i have received some feedback about the proposed changes that i mentioned, making gamp more like the suggestions given to me by ik0. the results seemed to be that everyone was in favor of removing the logo in favor of more information on the main screen and being able to see song name/position when editing the playlist. i'm hoping to have some time over the holidays to do a bit of work on this and start implementing these changes along with all the other new features i've been discussing. i'll keep you posted as things develop.
first, i just fixed the gamp mailing lists. the archives were broken, and posting messages (including subscribe attempts) was broken. should all be working great now. let me know if you experience any problems. also, slight redesign to the webpage to make it a bit easier to navigate. i've moved all the older news items into a separate file to reduce some of the clutter.
second, just thought i'd let everyone know that i've been doing some work on the next gamp release, v1.1.0. all kinds of new features in it and a few fixes too. watch this space for further info, but please, keep reading!
the testing of gamp-1.1.0 is not the main reason for todays update. yesterday i got a rather interesting piece of email about gamp that i'd really like to get some user feedback on. this person had hacked gamp's user interface to rearrange the way it did things and also to add a bit of color, both of which are quite interesting. here's a couple screenshots showing the player and playlist editor. while i'm mostly happy with the current interface for the player, i've always wanted something more of the player side of things. this is what had led me to incorporate popup windows for song info and upcoming songs. the big gamp logo was really only incorporated as an alternate to the old broken spectrum in the early gamp releases. now that the spectrum analyzer is long gone, the logo isnt really necessary and it'd be good to put that screen real estate to some good use, such as the ideas shown the above screenshots. i like the addition of the song position/name/time in the playlist editor, however the help shown on the left side is the player help and doesnt apply to the playlist editor. also, i dont think that the help info is something that needs to be seen at all times, so i think it's well suited to remaining a popup. the player however would benefit from always showing the song info and the upcoming songs in the playlist.
some other interesting ideas which he raised were to get the volume control working. this is something i've wanted to put into gamp for a while as it never worked properly in the initial gamp releases and has been completely disabled since the rewrite. i think the best solution to this problem would be to have user definable commands (via the config file) that would call something like aumix to raise/lower/mute the volume. this would be platform independent and would mean that i wouldnt be stuck trying to figure out how to talk to everyones sound card. this is definitely something that will be seen in future gamp releases, possibly even in 1.1.0.
the next suggestion which he raised was to have gamp remember the last playlist when it exits. i think this would also be a great idea. i'd put a config option to turn on/off remembering the playlist as well as specify the name/location of the 'default' playlist file. in this case i think that any playlist/songs specified on the command line would override this 'remembered' playlist.
their final suggestion is the only one that i'm not really interested in, but i'm still going to mention it to see what other people think. he mentioned an interest in being able to edit ID3 tags of songs from within gamp. personally, i think that there are already many programs (console and otherwise) that do this quite well and as such there isnt much point in making gamp, an mp3 player, do this too. it is possible that i could try and incorporate a way to spawn an external program to do this, but i think that it's best left to other programs. perhaps if i make an ncurses mp3 ripping tool someday this would be incorporated into it.
one possible solution which i suggested to the user interface question was for me to alter gamp so that it is possible for anyone to write a GUI 'plugin' of sorts that suits their liking. this would make it simple to swap between past, present, and future gamp interfaces or the interface proposed above. while i think it's an interesting idea, it would be alot of work and i'm not entirely sure how feasable it is to do. i'd be interested in hearing feedback on this to get a feel for what users think.
so i'd really like to get some user feedback about the above ideas. i'd like to know what people do/dont like about the current gamp user interface and what they do/dont like about the interface shown in the two screenshots above. if i were the only user i know what i'd do, but i'm not so i'd really like to hear what you (the users) think. please take a minute to send me an email with your comments on this. thanks, and thanks for using gamp!
gamp-1.0.2 is out. a few minor patches to provide better randomization, better directory browsing in the playlist editor, show filename in xterm title bar, and fixed a crash when attempting to load a non-existent playlist. more things planned when i've got time...
gamp-1.0.1 is out. minor patch to make it capture the stderr output from the backend player so that it doesnt corrupt the display. eliminates the need to run via:
gamp [options] [files] 2> /dev/nullalso added better error messages in forkplayer.c
gamp-1.0.0 is released! i'm finally at the point where all of the basic functions i wanted working are there and, despite beating on the player constantly for the last two weeks, i cant remember the last time it died. if you have any problems, ideas, suggestions, just let me know.
i've been working on the new and mostly rewritten version of gamp for a bit now. it's coming to the point where most of the features i want to see in it are there in some form or other, but it still requires some debugging. right now i'm getting an odd segfault that i cant quite explain, but can reproduce. hopefully i'll have that sorted out shortly. once i get everything pretty much done i'll put it here for your listening pleasure.
one of the biggest changes that you'll see in the upcoming version of gamp is that i have given up on trying to actually play the mp3s. my initial intention was to write a frontend for amp, but to get it to do what i wanted with the version of amp that i had at the time (amp-0.7.2) i had to actually hack parts of the amp source together with my frontend to get things working. since then i've found that the newer (and i think final version) of amp, amp-0.7.6, has gui support built into it. when i found that it could be used as a backend for the sajber jukebox i did a bit more investigation. it appears that mpg123 (which is still in development and probably better than amp these days) can also be used as a backend for sajber jukebox. with the power of multiple backends to choose from, i figured that writing an ncurses interface that uses the same communication mechanisms as the sajber jukebox does would be the best bet. i took some of the good parts from gamp, added in some of the many ideas i had and those that i've received through email and started rebuilding/rewriting this beast. it started a bit rough, but it is coming along very well. here's a list of features that are/will be included when i deem this release ready as well as their current status:
want to see something else not mentioned, or encourage me to move something from 'future' to 'in progress'? just drop me an email and let me know. any comments/suggestions are welcome.
comments to grub
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