Re: Rhythmbox Predictive Playback - Weekly Report

["Charlotte Curtis" <c f curtis gmail com>]

Final week (and only a day late)!

Last week was a little nuts, but after changing my approach several times, I finally created a basically functional version of my plugin in C.  I still have to add some robustification and some additional features, but the main parts are there: database analysis and choosing new songs to add to the playlist.  I also learned a lot about GNOME programming in C, wrapping C++ functions so they can be used in C, and threading.

In addition, last week came with a nice surprise from another developer: a guy named Soren Harward emailed me to tell me that he had been busy taking the parts from Marsyas that are used for audio fingerprinting and re-writing them all as a lightweight C library.  I decided not to use this immediately as I'd like to do some testing first (it's slightly different from the algorithms that I use), but I'm hoping that in the near future I can migrate to this library, which is about a 35 kB download instead of almost 40 MB.  Also, the best part is that it uses gstreamer - no more "only ogg and mp3 songs can be analyzed"!

I'm really looking forward to continuing work on my project, as well as other programs and projects that I keep running across (I've been resisting doing others because I knew I had to finish this one).  The GNOME community and my mentor, Philip Van Hoof, have been awesome, and I've learned a huge amount (autotools, Glib/Gobject, threading, Rhythmbox plugins in both C and Python, swig... the list goes on).

Next up is a move across the country to start a master's at the University of Calgary, so I probably won't be doing quite so much hacking in the next couple of weeks as I work on condensing what I need from my apartment into a Honda Civic (as well as moving my boyfriend to London for Law School).  However, I'll probably be hanging out on irc from time to time, and once school gets going I've got all sorts of ideas of things I'd like to work on, so this isn't the last you'll hear from me.

Take care,

Charlotte