GStreamer Bounty

I'm willing to start a bounty for someone to fix/port/implement the required pieces of GStreamer so that Sound Juicer can rip a whole CD, fully tagged (all tags SJ writes must be correctly encoded), to MPEG4 AAC (as used natively by iTunes). A requirement is that a music player that support MPEG4 files can see the tags without any extra work: the primary test for this will be importing the ripped files into iTunes.

I think there are many people out there who would like this to happen, so I want to arrange a group bounty. Bounty County looked promising but I have to specify how much the bounty is up front, I can't just let the fund grow as people donate what they can. The Bounties section on Launchpad has the same limitation. Does anyone know a reputable site for managing donations like this, or should I just get register a new email address on PayPal and get people to donate there?

Also to gauge how much interest there is in this, can anyone who would consider donating leave a comment?

NP: Vertigo, Groove Armada

15:45 Friday, 23 Jun 2006 [#] [computers] (11 comments)

Posted by Chris Ball at Fri Jun 23 16:16:31 2006:
fundable.org does this, I think; see https://www.fundable.org/groupactions/handwriting-recognition-engine/
Posted by Ross at Fri Jun 23 16:23:03 2006:
The problem with fundable is that it isn't clear what happens when the "target amount" is reached.  Does collection stop?  Also I don't have a target amount, so what would I put for that?
Posted by Raphael Slinckx at Fri Jun 23 16:45:34 2006:
I'm willing to offer between 20$ and 50$ for this bounty.
Posted by Mikey Cooper at Fri Jun 23 16:46:48 2006:
I'll chip in $20 USD
Posted by Ronald S. Bultje at Fri Jun 23 17:48:31 2006:
Ross,

I've followed your previous blog entries on this, and can't really help but wondering why you're not just porting relevant GStreamer 0.8 code over to 0.10. I've wondered the same thing about other features, but will not elaborate on that here.

In GStreamer 0.8, al those features already existed. FFMpeg has a mp4/m4a muxer (also a quicktime muxer, which uses the same code but is a different muxer entry). Both of those are wrapped to a certain extent in gst-ffmpeg, and both are tested and known to generate valid (with metadata), playable (in totem, xine and mplayer) MPEG-4 AAC files using something like "gst-launch filesrc location=file.mp3 ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! faac ! ffmux_mp4 ! filesink location=file.m4a". I wrote the muxer for use in the now-obsolete Cupid, but it worked just fine for audio also.

Note that output files from those commands do not actually work in gtkpod. This appears to be due to the file headers being at the end of the file instead of the beginning (which is not supported in the crappy library that gtkpod uses to read metadata out of files), however I believe that iTunes (since it's based on quicktime) would not have this limitation and just support the file (including transfer to the iPod). Testing this on smoe old GStreamer-0.8 installation should take someone owning a Mac about one minute.

For what it's worth, I have no interest in porting over the code; I didn't break the previous versions by making random API modifications and it still works fine for me on my old installation.

Cheers,
Ronald
Posted by Ronald S. Bultje at Fri Jun 23 17:48:39 2006:
Ross,

I've followed your previous blog entries on this, and can't really help but wondering why you're not just porting relevant GStreamer 0.8 code over to 0.10. I've wondered the same thing about other features, but will not elaborate on that here.

In GStreamer 0.8, al those features already existed. FFMpeg has a mp4/m4a muxer (also a quicktime muxer, which uses the same code but is a different muxer entry). Both of those are wrapped to a certain extent in gst-ffmpeg, and both are tested and known to generate valid (with metadata), playable (in totem, xine and mplayer) MPEG-4 AAC files using something like "gst-launch filesrc location=file.mp3 ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! faac ! ffmux_mp4 ! filesink location=file.m4a". I wrote the muxer for use in the now-obsolete Cupid, but it worked just fine for audio also.

Note that output files from those commands do not actually work in gtkpod. This appears to be due to the file headers being at the end of the file instead of the beginning (which is not supported in the crappy library that gtkpod uses to read metadata out of files), however I believe that iTunes (since it's based on quicktime) would not have this limitation and just support the file (including transfer to the iPod). Testing this on smoe old GStreamer-0.8 installation should take someone owning a Mac about one minute.

For what it's worth, I have no interest in porting over the code; I didn't break the previous versions by making random API modifications and it still works fine for me on my old installation.

Cheers,
Ronald
Posted by Ronald S. Bultje at Fri Jun 23 17:50:43 2006:
Oh, there's a patch for ffmpeg muxer support in gst-ffmpeg-0.10.x in bugzilla, if I remember correctly. so you don't actually need to port the elements yourself.
Posted by Benjamin Carlyle at Wed Jul 12 22:13:55 2006:
Should GStreamer become an efficient software project[1]? :)

Benjamin.
[1] http://efficientsoftware.pbwiki.com/
Posted by Julian Woods at Tue Oct 31 20:41:40 2006:
Has this progressed any further, I see this limitation to Linux as one of my reasons that I still have to have XP on my machine, well at least boot into it. I probably have 30 other reasons many more improbable than this one, but at least it would be one off the list. I would be willing to donate.
Posted by Ross at Tue Oct 31 20:52:46 2006:
I think it has progressed a bit: the ffmpeg muxers have been updated IIRC. I'll check.
Posted by Richard at Sun Nov 5 05:16:03 2006:
Yeah - post 0.10.1 release there is this comment
"Port of FFMpeg muxers to 0.10."
...might be getting there soon...

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