A potted account of Ross' life

Would you mind clearing out the  -DGTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED in src/Makefile.am so those of use running GTK 2.3 can build this without having to modify your sources.

Hi Ross

First of all I have say that you have done great work w.r.t Sound Juicer.

I use Gentoo at home and recently came across this link in their forums

http://www.dropline.net/optimystic/

This is a link for Optimystic, a cd burning software  created with Gnome2 in mind.

Would you be open to hear out three requests ?

1. It would be good for Gnome if sound-juicer and optimystic could work together as one application.

2. Would it be possible to provide encoding settings for the formats in which sound-juicer can extract audio ? E.g. for MP3 options can be CBR, VBR, bit rate etc.


Thanks
Regards
Vivek

1. I don't really see how sound-juicer and optimystic could work together, as they have perform different tasks.

2. Yes, in 0.6. I've mentioned this many, many, many times. :)

Hi Ross

[quote]
1. I don't really see how sound-juicer and optimystic could work together, as they have perform different tasks.
[/quote]

The reason I was trying to suggest this was because such an application could then be integrated with rhythmbox (instead of integrating two separate applications, one for burning playlists and one for extracting audio) and hence users will have a common application with a common / simple user interface.

We really need good application integration in Gnome.

[quote]
2. Yes, in 0.6. I've mentioned this many, many, many times. :)
[/quote]

Sorry 'bout that. I should have read about this before.

Also, what do you think of some integration between rhythmbox and sound-juicer that will enable rhythmbox to automatically add the songs that were extracted from sound-juicer when sound-juicer was launched from rhythmbox ? (I am not sure that this would be the responsibility of sound-juicer but perhaps of rhythmbox. Probably the only thing needed would be for sound-juicer to pass the extraction completed event along with the list of songs filenames to which rhythmbox could subscribe to)

Anyway, I need to stop my rambling for the time being. Thanks for listening.

Regards
Vivek

I'll tell you my personal direction for CD in Rhythmbox.  To extract a CD Rhythmbox uses the SjExtractor non-UI object, which does all of the work. The rest of the code in sound-juicer is the UI, but Rhythmbox should replace this for total integration.  I also have CD burning patches for Rhythmbox which use the nautilus-cd-burner non-UI objects, and provides an interface which simply asks for the device to write to. The Rhythmbox playlist interface provides the rest, i.e. track names/order/duration.  Rhythmbox could use the cd writing components of Optymistic, but most people have n-c-b installed now that it is part of GNOME 2.4.

I also have been sent a patch in the past so that sound-juicer can notify Rhythmbox when a track is ripped, but I wasn't totally happy with commiting it at the time.  I shall see... but as I said my vision of sound-juicer/rhythmbox integration means that the user should not know that a different application was started.

Hi Ross

I think you are right in your thinking about the proper integration. I was unaware of the info. that you just gave.

So, in light of the info you have provided, the idea about sound-juicer raising an extraction completed event seems less attractive.

Thanks for sharing your ideas 'bout the integration.

Regards
Vivek

Is there any chance you could add support for writing the Genre to files? I use this quite extensively to organise my playlists now Rhythmbox has the Automatic playlists feature =)

Genre? Bluntly, no.  MusicBrainz does not support genre at the moment and I'm not switching to FreeDB as MusicBrainz has way to many plus points.  When MusicBrainz supports genre, of course SJ will write it.

However, I do have a patch so the user can set the genre manually. I must test it and it might be applied soon.

How fast should Sound Juicer be ripping? From an out-of-the box Fedora Core 1 install on my laptop here, its rather slow. There's no elapsed time indicator and i've yet to time it, but the average track takes maybe a minute and 1/2 (this is very approximite). For me, a fresh CD popped into iTunes ripps at 10x per track, which is lovely.

Perhaps I'm just spoiled by this, but I would think that I could get at least equal performance (if not significantly better) out of anything accepted into the Gnome desktop...

Eric -- some comments.  CD ripping in linux is generally slow than it should be unless you are running kernel 2.6, as it always uses PIO instead of DMA to access the drive.  There may well be some overhead in SJ in the way I am multitasking between ripping and GUI code (so the interface doesn't block), once the code is stable I'm going to do some benchmarks.

However, code first, optimise later is a very good maxim to work by.

An extension to be able to manually add a Genre if desired would be fine - I often change the supplied one, say from Punk Rock to just Rock if I want to group them differently anyways.
As an aside, all the CD ripping apps I've used in Linux have been similarly slow -- I don't think this is a sound-juicer specific issue. If 2.6 kernel allows DMA access for ripping -- bring it on! ;)