Nightingale Media Player Preview Released 79
First time accepted submitter ilikenwf writes "You may or may not remember the Mozilla-based Songbird media player, which dropped official Linux support in April, 2010. Since then, the Nightingale community fork has waxed and waned in terms of membership and progress, but thanks to having a completely new dev team has today produced a preview build based on Songbird 1.8.1. The team promises a release of a Songbird trunk based build later this year, with fixes and an upgrade to Gecko 6. Plans to support Linux, Windows, and Mac are in the works, with the preview builds being available only for Linux and Windows at the moment. Aside from trying to pull in refugees from the Songbird community, Nightingale wants more developers to aid in fixing dropped and broken features from Songbird — and to add new ones."
Re: (Score:1)
Their playlist interface and lyric plugin was great. Though now I'm using amarok instead
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Or Rhythmbox, or Amarok, or Banshee, or Exaile, or Guayadeque...
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
What I want to know is why a media player needs a web browser engine (Gecko 6) in it.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Same could be said for email. It adds nothing but bloat. I am an intelligent person, I can read. I don't need some fancy formatting. Forums are the same. Give me access to newsgroups and my client can format it the way I want to. No one else needs to define the look for me.
looks puzzlingly at the HTML used in the previous comment
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Because if it can handle /. then for a media player it should be able to be able to provide "near instantaneous" performance but still have the extension capability of the Firefox browser.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
That would be to render the store interfaces so you can be sold more content in-app.
Re: (Score:2)
What I want to know is why a media player needs a gui. Data in, audio out is all you really need.
Re: (Score:2)
You're forgetting the video part. "Media player" != "music player". Most people prefer some kind of gui so they don't have to remember all the hotkeys for changing volume, changing tracks, ordering track playback, and setting all kinds of various options. This goes for playing both audio-only and video files.
Re: (Score:1)
I just feed it with data and mplayer plays it, it doesn't get in my way with stupid GUIs.
Re: (Score:2)
Formatted hypertext with images is a common and effective way to present data to the user. In the case of a media player, this can include album or movie data, lyrics, liner notes, or, as others have noted more cynically, a store.
Browser engines are as good a method as any of providing that functionality. They're better than many, in fact. Reusing an existing engine is less bloaty than cooking up a new one for every task.
Re: (Score:2)
Most C++ GUI applications don't use a browser engine to present formatted text and graphics to users, and they seem to work just fine, without having nearly as large a footprint as a browser. Worse, re-using an existing engine may require less developer time, but it's still bloaty, unless your browser-engine-media player is sharing the same engine as your regular web browser. It's pretty obvious that's not the case here; this one will load its own slightly different browser engine, consuming tons of memor
Re: (Score:2)
I dunno. Mebbe you want to access metadata that just happens to be on the web? The web is the world's library.
Re: (Score:2)
My media player, Amarok, seems to already do this, with lyrics fetching, and also linking to several independent music stores like Magnatune, without (AFAIK) needing to use a browser engine. Lots of apps fetch data from the web, but they don't fetch it in HTML format, but as raw data, and display it with much lighter weight code.
Re: (Score:1)
I finally settled on Audacious. It still has lots of features I never use, but the interface is simple.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, I'm totally hooked to Exaile. Small bug still: adding files to a playlist while it's playing a song from said playlist crashes it. Apart from that, very cool player. Was using Songbird before it and I probably won't go 'back' to Nightingale now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Have fun playing stuff on the proprietary OS of your choice then.
It's like a world without zinc.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Funny)
Right! But admittedly, it's a lot more friendly than those who develop it. As their support forums prove beyond any shadow of a doubt. These are the kind of people who give open source software a bad name. The Sheldon-Cooper-types.
Re: (Score:2)
Is it not worth my while going onto the forums and asking them to fix the infuriating habit VLC has of crashing repeatedly on OSX at the slightest hint of a buffer underrun? (How about the people who code(d) MPlayer OSX Extended, btw? That normally runs OK for me on Intel but the PPC version is the shittest piece of shit I've ever encountered, and I've encountered actual shit.)
These are actually serious questions, I'm getting mildly frustrated trying to find a properly stable Mac movie player that isn't blo
Re: (Score:2)
I *think* it's the UI; if I remember right I've actually run from the command-line, but I'll have to check on that. It wouldn't surprise me if it were crappy drivers on the PPC version of OSX, I must admit. Especially if you had problems with the drivers before.
Re: (Score:2)
VLC is my preferred DVD player. I rip all my discs to ISO file and VLC has no problem playing the files as if they were real discs.
That being said, VLC does have quite a bit of functionality that I don't understand.
Re: (Score:3)
VLC is more than just a copy of iTunes or WMP.
If you find those other things confusing and disturbing, then leave those parts of the app alone.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a difference between a media player and a media manager and songbird has some capability in that direction which i'm hoping Nightingale might improve on.
Here is my problem which maybe addressed by Songbird/Nightingale.
I have a Nas with a 2 TB drive with assorted files on some of which are music files some have correct tagging data (under various tag schemes) and some do not.
I'd like to put all the Mp3 files under artist/album/track separated from the rest of the mess
To be honest I'd Like to
Yahoo was working on Something like this. (Score:3)
I interviewed with them down in Santa Monica maybe 4 years back. They had hired the WinAmp guys and they were working on a media player with HTML integration in it. It really didn't seem like all that good of an idea.
HTML 5 Makes most of that obsolete and most of what I see people doing like Apps, Flash, download players etc.
To be honest, I only have a Yahoo Account just for IM and have never even looked to see what they are doing with Music these days.
I still think the Original Napster was the best service, if there were such a service for a flat rate I'd be a happy camper.
Re: (Score:2)
all the whizzbang(needless extra shit) in winamp is html.
Re: (Score:2)
iPod support? (Score:3)
Anyone know if the windows version supports adding/removing files from an iPod classic? Still trying to find a tool that's not shit for that particular purpose...
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks, AC. I'll keep an eye on this project, then.
Re: (Score:2)
If you can name a single "open" hard drive based audio player (not "media player"), then please do so. Otherwise, why make useless comments?
Re: (Score:2)
very old archos.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
There are levels of "lock down", to which the iPod is towards the meaner end of the spectrum.
While not (as far as I'm aware) an open source device, I've been very happy with my Cowon iAudio device. It functions as a UMS device (which means it has drag-and-drop file transfers under every system with a USB port). It works fine under every OS you can throw it at (any versions of Windows, Mac or Linux). And it plays pretty much every file format I know of in mainstream use. It also has dozens of audio and equal
Re: (Score:2)
I've looked at the iAudios, and while the UMS support is nice (I miss those) it fails on my primary requirement: They're flash-based instead of HDD-based. I don't care what it looks like (I replaced my first Nomad with a Neuros II, FFS) but I do want a hard-drive based player (otherwise, there are dozens of options less obnoxious than an iPod Classic)
Ironically enough, Apple seems to be the only one willing to feed the bang-for-buck market in mp3 players.
Re: (Score:2)
Some of the Cowon range (not necessarily iAudio branded) have HDD instead of flash. Aside from capacity, though, I'm not sure why you'd want it. Maybe my music collection is just titchy, but I've never been able to exceed the 32 GB or so which is the max for most flash devices.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. Capacity. :) Especially if it's a UMS compatible device, because then it can double as a temporary transport. As a fan of audiobooks, and an eclectic taste in music, my 160GB classic is currently loaded to about 58GB, mostly so that I don't have to change my stored files away when my mood changes... "Hmm. Let's take off the Manowar Discography and put on Queen..." sort of thing.
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty much any device that doesn't have an Apple or Microsoft logo works like this. Newer Androids are also handy in this respect.
Someone else mentioned Archos specifically.
Re: (Score:2)
They mentioned "very old Archos," meaning 'not for sale anymore.' AFAIK (and I've looked. A lot),Archos hasn't made a dedicated music player in a very long time. I don't need the size, the poor form factor, or the added expense of a full media player, which is all I seem to be able to find from Archos anymore.
Re: (Score:2)
winamp handles classic ipods quite well.
by quite well I mean 12343242352 light years and 23432423432423% better than itunes(transcodes too if you have some ipod unfriendly media). not sure about video support though, but itunes handles that like crap anyways..
I think it uses that some mlpod(or something) library for it, so other players should have support too.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not the tool that's shit, it's the hardware that's shit. It should be dead simple to delete data from a storage device, any storage device that makes it complicated is garbage.
Re: (Score:2)
It's what I'm currently using. It works with my classic, and it's better than iTunes, but that's really all you can say for it. It's a strange day when you realize you've been spoiled by GTKPod...
Thought I'd give it a try... (Score:4, Informative)
1. Stability
First time importing my songs: Crash
Second time importing my songs: Went fine
2. Online Integration
All the help / addons / web integration stuff seems to be no-show. The pages are 404's, empty, or wiki not found's...
3. Video Playback (or lack thereof)
Attempted to load some videos and it constantly complained about not having the codecs to play them. The 'solution' given was to visit the Wiki page... which doesn't exist...
Well, at least the media playback and selection works more or less after getting started. Its not in a state which I'd consider switching, but it has at least some potential.
A humble request for Linux media player developers (Score:2)
Please... Try to make gapless MP3 playback work. Or if it's the fault of the underlying engine, file bugs against it; you are better positioned to understand the issues.
<semi-rant> I remember that it took Apple ages to fix this in iPods and iTunes; then they finally did when the 2nd gen Nano was released. But it stayed fixed after that. There are rumors that some versions of gstreamer had functional gapless MP3, but it later broke and nobody bothered to fix it. Why is it so difficult? Does nobody noti
Re: (Score:2)
Clementine has this option. Under Preferences > Playback > Fading
Check ON 'Cross-fade when changing tracks automatically. Default between songs is 2000 ms and is adjustable.
Re:A humble request for Linux media player develop (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
As a totally off-topic question, why was MP3 designed with such large frames? To me it would have made sense to have fixed them to the CD, or to an integer divisor of them, since it must have been obvious from the start that a large use for MP3 would be storing audio from CDs?
Re: (Score:2)
Possibly I guess.
Re: (Score:1)
As a totally off-topic question, why was MP3 designed with such large frames? To me it would have made sense to have fixed them to the CD, or to an integer divisor of them, since it must have been obvious from the start that a large use for MP3 would be storing audio from CDs?
The discrete cosine transform that mp3 uses typically requires about 512 samples to effectively capture the necessary coefficients that represent a statistically coherent unit of audio, or "frame" in mp3's terminology. So, it's a technical constraint, not a design one. Smaller frames wouldn't be able to accurately sample low frequencies.
Also, there wouldn't be much compression if you had 44100 frames per second, would it?
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks very much.
And a very good point about the number of frames :)
Re: (Score:2)
The discrete cosine transform that mp3 uses typically requires about 512 samples to effectively capture the necessary coefficients that represent a statistically coherent unit of audio, or "frame" in mp3's terminology.
That seems reasonable and I'll take your word for it. In practice, then, an MP3 frame is about 1/80th of a second (41,000 samples/sec / 512 samples/frame ~= 80 frames/second)? If so, a completely empty extra frame between two tracks would inject 12ms of silence between songs. Is that noticeable enough to be an issue?
Re: (Score:2)
Please... Try to make gapless MP3 playback work. .... Does nobody notice? Does anybody listen to, say, Pictures at an Exhibition? (You'd notice.) Sigh.</semi-rant>
Yes, and yes. This is one of my criteria for a media player. Currently I'm using MOC (MOCP under Ubuntu since it conflicts with QT's Meta Object Compiler). It's not the prettiest thing in the world, but it does do gapless playback and it doesn't require everything to be stuffed into some kind of media library first (this makes it handy if you need to scan through a bunch of sound clips or something).
Re: (Score:2)
If you want gapless mp3, you can still use XMMS. The xmms-crossfade [eisenlohr.org] plugin also handles gapless output.
VLC (Score:2)
Feature I want: pitch controlled playback (Score:1)
One big reason I use VLC as my usual media player: it has decent pitch control / speed control built in. So, I can listen to podcasts or audiobooks a bit faster, and yank back a few minutes of time.
Also good for guilty pleasures like sit-coms; much nicer to watch The Big Bang Theory in 17 minutes instead of 22. (And if I could find versions with the laugh-track missing, I think it might be down to about 9 ...)
timothy
Re: (Score:2)