buzztard is now buzztrax

We applied as an organisation to take part in the Google Summer of Code program, but got rejected mainly due to the project name. As this was not the first time people where uncomfortable with the name, we renamed the project - buzztard is now called buzztrax. The homepage with the wiki and wordpress already got moved. The renamed codebase is online at github. The mailing lists have been migrated to buzztrax.org. A few things still need to be fixed (e.g. file releases).

Besides the renaming there are also some improvements on the code side. I am probably the last one to discover the g_signal_handlers_disconnect_by_* macros. Using these made the code a bit leaner. I also worked on the level-meter features. I did some cleanups on the widget. The syncing code is more efficient as we listen to sync-messages on the gstreamer side to avoid another thread round trip. Song rendering can disabled the level-meters for less noise on the screen and some performance savings. The song-rendering now uses the TOC support in gstreamer-1.0. That means that the labels of a song (intro, chorus, break, ...) will end up in wav and flac files right now. When other formats support toc, this will automatically work for those formats too. The flag in ogg muxing got fixed in upstream and now works for us again.

56 files changed, 715 insertions(+), 631 deletions(-)

buzztard & gstreamer hackfest

This month I mostly cleaned up small bits and pieces from the gstreamer-1.0 port. Most notably multitrack encoding works again. The handling of EOS and starting of the next track was racy. Speaking of the recording dialog - this one now has some basics for a silent mode implemented. For now it only disables the scrolling in the sequence view. Next thing would be to disable the level meters.

I hacked a bit more on the child-proxy iface. This now turned into utility functions that allows to write:
bt_child_proxy_set(obj, "prop1::prop2::prop3", val, NULL);
So what does this do?
GObject obj1, obj2;
g_object_get(obj, "prop1", &obj1, NULL);
g_object_get(obj1, "prop2", &obj2, NULL);
g_object_set(obj2, "prop3", val, NULL);
g_object_unref (obj2);
g_object_unref (obj1);
This saved quite a few lines of C in buzztard. I wonder if this is something we want to add to glib? If we do I would go for a single ':' as a separator and we might also want to consider starting the property with one:
g_object_set(obj, ":prop1:prop2:prop3", val, NULL);
The leading ':' would help to quickly detect whether we need to split the property name and recurse into child objects. The whole scheme is backwards compatible as property names are not allowed to contain ':'.

In the end of march I attended the GStreamer hackfest in Milano. First I looked into a few tests - both on GStreamer and buzztard side. On the GStreamer side adder has some test fixes. On the buzztard side I improved my encoding tests. Wim gave me the crucial tip that fixed the dynamic adding/removing of analyzers while playing. Maybe I can try that for machines again. I showed the parser for controller-setups to some people and did smaller changes on it. I also discussed what we could do with gst-tracelib for gst-1.0 and started a new design-draft for it.

41 files changed, 871 insertions(+), 816 deletions(-)

buzztard

As I already mentioned in last months issue, I ported buzztard and gst-buzztard to use gstreamer-1.0. It will require 1.1.X for some fixes in gstreamer itself. So how did it went. The basic porting to make it compile against 1.0 took about 20 hours spread over a couple of days. It is quite straight forward. I updated the porting guide where things were not mentioned.

The more tricky part where the soft api changes. At this port I was running the apps with G_DEBUG=fatal_warnings. The property name changes here and there we easy to fix. Also request pad name changes (%d -> _%u) took not too long to handle. Other things like caps negotiation kept me busy for a few evenings. For once I was e.g. writing GST_AUDIO_NE ("S16") instead of GST_AUDIO_NE (S16) which leads to caps negotiation failing. Another recommendation is to avoid setting channel-mask=3 for stereo caps. It is purely optional, most elements drop it anyway and by leaving it out, you can merge the mono and stereo caps.

I ported freeverb in plugins-bad and made fixed to audiopanorama and adder. Adder and collectpads have a few more new tests upstream. Another things that took a while was getting seek-in-ready to work again. Buzztard needs to configure the playback segment from the application, as the sources happy beep for all eternity. In 0.10 I could send a seek to my bin in ready, in 1.0 it gets dropped (pads are flushing). Now I recursively iterate over sources and seek on all of them. This is only needed to get to playing. To get these things fixed I ported a few of my stand alone examples, but the majority of this is still left unported.

Now the basics seem to work. I am confident that I can fix the remaining issues in march and look forward to attend the hackfest in Milano over easter.

The porting for buzztard:
69 files changed, 1909 insertions(+), 1473 deletions(-)
The porting for gst-buzztard:
34 files changed, 1254 insertions(+), 1414 deletions(-)

The other thing I was doing this month was to experiment with embeddable scripting engines. I wrote a toy gtk app that opens a window, sets up the scripting engine, registers a function to get the window handle and start a script that calls the function to get the window and adds a vbox with two labels. I did that for lua, seed and gjs. For lua it took 30 min, for seek it took 30min, for gjs it took 2 hours and is still not working fully (the custom function returning a gobject).

69 files changed, 1907 insertions(+), 1507 deletions(-)

buzztard 0.7 is out

We started the year with a release in the beginning of January. So far only a few issues were reported. Patches for these are on the 0.7.1 branch. One last minute change in 0.7 was the departure from trying to link/unlink elements in gstreamer while playing. I sadly have to conclude that in 0.10 this only works for some cases. It was working sort of okayish for buzztard, but the were still deadlocks or internal dataflow errors from time to time. One such scenario is that when you happen to reconnect elements while the song loops. These things are not easy to sync from the application level. Lets hope this is easier in 1.0. The sticky events should help with setting up the context from new elements.

On the mainline I bumped the required library version and removed the ifdefs for the backwards compatibility. As a first bigger change, I ported the settings from gconf to dconf. We had a settings abstraction to other gconf or play keyfiles, which we now removed. Altogether I kept to use an intermediate object that exposes settings as a gobject with properties for the keys. This allows to use notify to bind to property changes instead of using a custom api.

Then I started with porting gst-buzztard & buzztard to gstreamer-1.0. I made good progress. I will report the details in the next update.

77 files changed, 5892 insertions(+), 8131 deletions(-)

buzztard

Happy new 2013!

Besides a lot of testing and little bug fixes here and there I finished of a few half ready features. One is range-randomize (press Ctrl+Shift+R). In contrast to randomize which takes the parameters min-max value as bounds, this one picks the bounds from the first and last value in the selected range. The other one is that now one can rename machines also from the sequence headers. I was afraid that swapping the GtkLabel with a GtkEntry would use too much space and look ugly, but luckily one can turn off the frame. I still get a different background color though.

During testing I noticed some inconsistencies when renaming machines and found a rather bad data corruption. Certain interaction would create songs that won't read back fully. One can manually fix them up (it is xml after all). I fixed the bug and could even make the format a bit simpler. I had to touch quite a few places:
30 files changed, 246 insertions(+), 404 deletions(-)
Old songs can still be read, but songs written with the new version, also need the new version for reading. One lesson learned, the 'id' attribute in xml is special.

Another results from testing is that the shell based test scripts can now be run standalone to check a bunch of songs (do syntax check, print stats, convert or encode songs).

Finally I entered string freeze for 0.7. I already received the first updates for the translations, thanks a lot! I am looking forward to release it soon.

I uploaded some example song snippets to soundcloud.

438 files changed, 3138 insertions(+), 2800 deletions(-)