History of Ocarina

Ocarina started in April 2009 as an experiment in writing my own music player.  I used to use one of the big players included as an option in most Linux distributions, but they released a major update that happened to remove most of the features I relied on.  Clearly the only reasonable solution was to write my own, and so Ocarina was born!

Ocarina 1

Ocarina

I started working in Python, and wrote mostly experimental code that provided me with an opportunity to learn about both GTK+ and GStreamer.

Ocarina 2

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A rewrite soon followed, adding many new features.  This was the first version to support a feature I can’t live without: the ability to queue up songs to play later.

Ocarina 3

I never got very far with Ocarina 3.  The goal was to create a generic Python framework that I could share with other projects, but I never got very far.  The code I wrote was too complicated to use, and I eventually tossed it out.

Ocarina 4

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Ocarina 4 was when I really began to innovate.  I quickly decided that I should emphasize the “currently playing” song list, and the rest of the UI flowed from there.

Ocarina 5

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I rewrote Ocarina 5 in C++ so I could take advantage of the syntax checking that compilers offer.  I also added in several new features including AutoPause, a visual history tab, and multiple rearrangeable queues.

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