G'day everyone,
This is a collection of random thoughts and ideas that I've had over the
past couple of days - I decided to write them down and see what everyone
thinks. Some of these are things I might have a go at sometime soon
(depending on how much time I have).
DAAP aka iTunes music sharing:
On the client side (playing music from DAAP shares) there is libopendaap
which would do most of the work for us. The big question is whether to
use it directly; [0] has the beginnings of a gnome-vfs wrapper for it.
Personally I think that using it via gnome-vfs wouldn't work to well; as
it would hide away a head of information that would be useful, and make
monitoring for changes harder.
Libopendaap gives the files to us through a file descriptor (pipe),
playbin can use these (via a fd:// URI) in versions 0.8.10 or higher of
GStreamer.
Some interesting UI things I've been thinking of are:
* being able to create (client side) automatic playlists for DAAP
sources would be nice.
* Having a "all network music" source, which combines the music from all
DAAP sources
* The above, but with _all_ sources: i.e. DAAP shares, local music,
whatever else
Google Summer of Code (Shared Music Spaces):
Also on music sharing - One of the GNOME bounties for Google's Summer of
Code it to let people in the same chat room (using Gaim) listen to what
other people are listening to.
One of the two RB-side parts of this would be to let Gaim control
(presumable via DBus) a listing of streaming servers for the other users
music. What I'm thinking would be to have Gaim say "Add server X to
'Gaim Music Spaces'" or something and have a new source called "Gaim
Music Spaces" be added if it didn't exist. The source would basically be
a variant on the IRadio source.
If the above got done, it could probably also be used for other
features; e.g. a program that reads RSS feeds and fills a listing in RB
automatically.
I'd probably be tempted to apply for this in the Summer of Code, if it
wasn't winter and hence have huge amounts of work to do for Uni.
Visualisation:
When using the PlayBin element supporting visualisation is fairly
trivial - I hacked up something that pops up a visualisation window in
about 10 lines of code. The problem is to decide on how it fits into RB.
The obvious UI would be to have it show up somewhere in the main window
(although I'm sure we don't need another sidebar widget), and respond to
clicks by becoming full-screen. One thing that I think would be nice
(for people with two monitors) it to be able to have it full-screen on
the second monitor, while having the RB window still there on the first.
Also what kind of options to show to the user is another thing we need
to think on: resolution, which visualisation(s) to use, etc. Overlaying
song metadata is always good.
CD playing:
This has been broken for a while. I could be wrong, but is getting basic
CD playing support much harder than passing a "cdda://" URI to playbin?
(and the stuff to check number and length of tracks, etc)
Cheers,
James "Doc" Livingston
[0] http://ishamael.tunkeymicket.com/software/daap.html
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