[Rhythmbox-devel] Gapless/crossfade playback in svn trunk

[Jonathan Matthew <jonathan kaolin wh9 net>]

Hi,

I just committed the gapless/crossfading player backend I've been
working on for a while.  It's been working pretty well for me for a few
months now, and I think I've managed to implement everything from the 
existing player backend, even if I"ve never tested some of it
(replaygain, for instance).

A brief rundown on how to use it:

- obviously, you need to build rhythmbox from svn trunk (gstreamer 0.10
  only, too)
- under edit->preferences, there's a new 'playback' tab; on this, check
  the 'use crossfading backend' option.  You can also set the crossfade
  length here (it currently only does whole numbers of seconds, so the
  slider is a bit of a lie - I'll fix this sooner or later)
- restart rhythmbox; from this point, changes to the crossfade settings
  or the network buffer size do not require a restart.
- if you experience problems, you can go back to the existing player
  backend by unsetting the 'use crossfading backend' and restarting

This isn't the final UI, it's just what I threw together to allow me to
test it.

Known problems:
- visualization is a bit shaky, and doesn't work at all with GStreamer
  core CVS
- if the network buffer size is set too high, some combination of queue
  settings blocks it from actually filling up, so playback never starts
- the recently added tee/filter interfaces probably don't work all that
  well (almost certainly the cause of the first problem)

When filing bugs about playback or UI issues, please note whether you're
using the crossfading backend or not.

enjoy!