Well it’s hacking season again. With GNOME’s switch from Subversion to Git complete, which means Banshee now uses Git too, it gave me an excuse to finally learn it. This was not fun. But having toughed it out, I can definitely say that I love it.
Now that Banshee is using Git, Aaron is starting work on a branch off of the 1.4 series to incorporate my visualization patch. Wielding my new Git tool belt, I was off and hacking. Taking Gabriel’s branch allowing replacement of source widgets, I rebased that from master to stable-vis, fixed the merge conflicts, and started hacking away at Banshee.OpenVP. Unfortunately, not all the pieces I needed were there yet. So I added them and pushed them up to Gitorious. Neat.
Now Banshee.OpenVP looks like this:
Fantastic. I can’t wait to test it out. Keep up the good work
hot, hot, hot……. cool to see the now playing code finally being worked on 😀
Why is now playing using clutter for visualisations? Does it use it to overlay the now playing over the visualisations when the mouse hovers over it?
Also is the toolbar at the top necessary?
Shouldn’t the options for what visualisations to use be in the menu bar at the top under view?
And lastly, don’t include the option to change the resolution for the visualisation, its unnecessary bloat in the ui.
Rhythmbox has this option and a toolbar which appears on mouse over to change the vis and its annoying more than anything else.
Its annoying because the distributors often choose a low resolution as the default regardless of what specs you are using and it makes the visualisations look bad.
They should use the best resolution dependant on the hardware available.
Pop up toolbars make sense for full screen scenarios but for windowed mode its a big no no.
Gah, my hard drive in my laptop is screwed, it picked the worst possible time to die on me because your visualisation work was mostly the reason I was checking out from trunk since banshee 1.0 patiently waiting for the day it hit main. The day it does Im stuck using a live cd 😀 lol
And maybe you should check this out, its freaking weird – http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/05/01/introducing-detuned/
> Why is now playing using clutter for visualisations?
It’s not.
> Also is the toolbar at the top necessary? Shouldn’t the options for what visualisations to use be in the menu bar at the top under view?
Possibly. However, it doesn’t take up extra room and makes the options more apparent. Burying it in a menu means you have to go hunt for it, and can’t quickly change the visualization. This means if you want to try out four or five visualizations on a particular song, you’ve gone from two clicks to about three-four plus a submenu pause. No thanks.
> And lastly, don’t include the option to change the resolution for the visualisation, its unnecessary bloat in the ui. They should use the best resolution dependant on the hardware available.
The “best resolution” is a matter of personal taste. Some visualizations look better at a low resolution and a higher framerate, others do not. I think you have a rather bizarre definition of “bloat” when you label a checkbox occupying an available space, with still plenty of empty screen space, as bloat.
> Pop up toolbars make sense for full screen scenarios but for windowed mode its a big no no.
The toolbar is not “pop up” and it is occupying a spot on the screen that would otherwise be empty, in an unobtrusive fashion.
I’m not saying that the user interface will not change, but I am saying that right now, the options present are incredibly simple (believe me, there are far more esoteric options I could create) and are presented in what I believe is the most intuitive and useful way.
> Gah, my hard drive in my laptop is screwed, it picked the worst possible time to die on me because your visualisation work was mostly the reason I was checking out from trunk since banshee 1.0 patiently waiting for the day it hit main. The day it does Im stuck using a live cd 😀 lol
Man that sucks. Hope you get your box up and running ASAP. Especially since all the Banshee patches you need to get going are now in a Git branch…
> And maybe you should check this out, its freaking weird – http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/05/01/introducing-detuned/
Looks bizarre.
Question:
How do I download these?
I have asked around the usual sites (incl. Ubuntu Forums) and nobody knows what the heck I’m talking about when I mention any kind of visualization for Banshee.
Are you sure this is for GNOME?
How come I haven’t seen it implemented in any of the official releases?
Thanks,
MattM.
There is currently no stable release, but you can build all the parts using these instructions.
It’s currently not implemented in an official release because it’s not done yet. 🙂
Okay, I tried entering the code (git clone git://gitorious.org/banshee/cdhowie-clone.git) in the Terminal, said there was no “git” command. So I excluded “git” and just started with “clone” same thing.
I’m using Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.
Do you have a Ubuntu Forums account? Can you make a thread there on how to build/install it?
Sorry, don’t really know how to build source code…
You, of course, need to install Git if you don’t have it — try
aptitude install git-core. There is also a good chance you will have to install a lot of -dev packages to build Banshee.I don’t have an Ubuntu Forums account, and any thread that I would create there would basically be a copy of the page I’ve already linked you to. (You are, of course, more than welcome to post that link on the forums yourself.)
OpenVP is still in development, and so it’s currently not easy to build and use. It requires compiling a Banshee branch from source, for example. If you’re not comfortable building things from source, then I would suggest waiting for the next Banshee release instead.
Okay, maybe I’ll wait.
My Ubuntu install is not an independent install, so messing it up would mean I’d have to go with Vista.
Yeah, I’ll wait.
Actually, I just tried building it, but when I try Step 2, it says:
fatal: not a git repository
what does this mean?
Also, it would be nice if we could edit our comments, but I suspect that that’s not possible, as this isn’t a forum, XD
That’s probably because you didn’t
cdinto the repository directory first.Do I have to uninstall my repository-installed Banshee first?
I’d rather not configure all my preferences all over again…
matthew@ubuntu:~/cdhowie-clone$ ./autogen.sh
Running intltoolize –force –copy …
You should add the contents of ‘/usr/share/aclocal/intltool.m4’ to ‘aclocal.m4’.
Running libtoolize –force –copy –automake …
Running aclocal -I build/m4/banshee -I build/m4/shamrock -I build/m4/shave …
Running autoconf …
configure.ac:121: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_GCONF_SOURCE_2
If this token and others are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow.
See the Autoconf documentation.
configure:13545: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_PATH_GLIB_2_0
configure:18124: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_GLIB_GNU_GETTEXT
Error: Could not run autoconf, which is required to configure banshee
I think I’m going to start a thread on Ubuntu Forums…
It’ll both get people to check out your site and help you finish this (or at least make it stable enough to implement into an official build), and help me figure out how come I can’t get it to work.
But right now I got (home)work to do!
Very good, spectacular! If you can tell when you have something available would be very grateful. What was missing was the excellent banshee!
Hugs and good work!