GStreamer Monkey's Audio plugin 0.6

[Christian Schaller <uraeus linuxrising org>]

This is the first release of the
standalone package containing the
GStreamer plugin for the Monkey's
Audio format (monkeysaudio.com).

We decided to not include this
plugin in our core release since the
basic Monkey's Audio library that is
included with the plugin has a
rather restrictive license which
demands you get permission from
original author before doing
anything with it except use it in
the form recieved.

Distributions wishing to include
this plugin with the GStreamer
packages might do so under the
permission we have recieved, but be
aware that it is a 'free beer'
licensed plugin and do not satisfy
either the FSF, Debian or OSI
standards for free software.

Monkey's Audio is a lossless audio
format similar to FLAC (FLAC is also
supported by GStreamer and available
under the free LGPL license.) In our
experience monkey's audio compresses
the files a bit more than FLAC does,
but do demand a bit more CPU than
FLAC to decode, so it is a tradeoff.

This plugin should work both with
the 0.6.x stable release series and
the upcoming 0.7.x development
series of GStreamer. The plugin
installs both a decoder and an
encoder, so you can use it to
playback your .ape files with
GStreamer based applications like
Gst-player and Totem, to convert
your .ape files to other formats
like FLAC, Ogg, Wav and Mp3 and to
convert your other media files to
.ape files.

As a sidenote we do hope this plugin
package will be usefull as an
example and source for buildscripts
etc. for developers who wish to
distribute GStreamer plugins either
standalone or with their libraries
and/or applications. For people
doing libraries that are yet not API
stable this might be a better
solution that including the plugin
in the core GStreamer packages as it
will avoid dependency problems when
people upgrade to new versions of
your library. 

Credits:
The Monkey's Audio plugin was made
by Jeremy Simon
The Monkey's Audio library was made
by Matt Ashland


Andres Salomon contributed the
patches needed to Make the plugin
work on big-endian systems like PPC
(Currently only works with GStreamer
0.7.x).
Christian F.K. Schaller did the
packaging and build scripts of this
standalone plugin.

Download instructions can be found
at the bottom of this page:
http://www.gstreamer.net/releases/gst-monkeysaudio/0.6.0/