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EtoileTunes

Posted on 26 May 2008 by Eric Wasylishen

For the past few weeks I've been working on EtoileTunes, a music player for Etoile. My goals were to try improve my Objective-C/GNUStep knowledge, to try out programming with EtoileUI and CoreObject, to work on a replacement for MultimediaKit, and to hopefully end up with a good enough music player to use regularly.

It's still in fairly early stages, but I have something that uses TagLib to read music file metadata, then constructs a CoreObject with that metadata. It then puts these into a COGroup subclass which represents a playlist, and displays this group with EtoileUI. The eventual goal, as I understand it, is for EtoileTunes not to be a separate application, but just a pre-defined layout which the normal object-manager UI in Etoile can take on. Jesse, Quentin, and I discussed some ideas for what would make a good music manager UI, so hopefully I can build some working mockups with EtoileTunes.

On the MultimediaKit replacement side, I have an incomplete, but working, Objective-C wrapper around Xine-lib which provides an API similar to MultimediaKit's (only for music, not video playback so far.) I'm also working on a GStreamer backend. A future task might be to write a MultimediaKit framework from "scratch" - an Objective-C framework that would fit between Etoile apps/services and the operating system's/sound server's audio API. It could use the ffmpeg project's libavcodec/libavformat libraries to do all of the hard work of decoding media formats. The advantages of this would be having something that exactly fits Etoile's needs, and fits in to the system perfectly (for example, the same code for decoding music could be used for transcoding between different formats, and be integrated into a system Etoile might provide for converting file formats), and being able to ensure details like gapless playback work perfectly. This might be a lot of work though - especially if it has to handle video playback and recording, and multiple OS backends, so it may be best to stick with GStreamer/Xine for now.

Here's a screenshot of EtoileTunes:

If you would like to try it, the code is in /branches/ericwa/EtoileTunes. It's still very work-in-progress, though.

Lastly, any suggestions for a better name? :)