Happy Thanksgiving! I’ve done more work than I realized over the last few months. Changes include:
This release took a few months longer than I was planning on, but I put a lot of work into making ocarina easier to use. I started off writing my own linked list class to use in playlists, but the interface still needs work so I haven’t started using it everywhere.
Something I didn’t plan on doing was rewriting the entire UI… that’s really what took the longest. I had some messy, hand-written code for showing the application and it wasn’t easy to work with at all. I dreaded adding new features or cleaning any of it up because something might break. I knew I would have to rewrite most of it eventually anyway to work on some UI changes that I planned on making, so I decided I would try to make future edits as easy as possible. I found GtkBuilder and the Glade UI designer and then spent several weeks cutting out old code and making everything work with this new system. I think the end result was worth it!
New features in Ocarina 5.10 include:
– Move playlist close button into the tab page because tabs were growing too wide.
– j/k keys move the currently highlighted down or up (vim style!).
– d deletes selected songs from the current playlist.
– Now playing and the AutoPause / Library / Settings notebook share space, everything in a single notebook resulted in a lot of wasted space.
– Users can manually hide the Recently Played and Banned tracks lists from the Settings tab.
New features in Ocarina 5.9 include:
– Reordering playlist tabs to change where the next song is picked from
– Close button on playlist tabs
– Reworked the entire build system
– Keep a play count and remember the date songs were last played
– “Ban” songs from playing in the library
Just released Ocarina 5.6. New things include:
– Backend alsa is optional
– Output to other alsa devices
– git-ish commands (`ocarina play`, `ocarina pause`)
– Tooltips showing filepath of hovered song
I’ve been sitting on Ocarina 5.5-rc for a while now without finding any serious bugs. When I compiled without the -g flag to g++ a few weeks ago there was a segmentation fault when reading in save files. This problem seems to be gone now, so hopefully it was a g++ error (I have no idea what else would cause it…).
New features include:
– Fairly big cleanup of the entire backend
– Queue is automatically saved across sessions
– Songs can be removed from the queue
– Faster library scanning
– Library update removes tracks that no longer exist
– Gapless playback using gstreamers “about-to-finish” signal
Ocarina 5.4 has been released. You can get it here. There is a PKGBUILD available here.
New features include:
– Library filtering
– Playback queue
– Pause after current song
I’m doing a feature freeze for the next release or two so I can clean up the code and make everything easier to work with. I also have ideas for how to make library scanning more efficient.
I’ve decided against implementing playlists for Ocarina 5, mostly because I don’t use them. I listen to my entire library on shuffle, so the only playlist I ever create is an exact copy of the library. It takes extra work to keep this playlist up to date, especially since I never took the time to easily show the difference between playlists and the library. I usually ended up clearing the entire playlist, and then readding every song from the library. This is unnecessary for how I listen to my music and avoiding the hassle is what Ocarina is all about.
I do plan on spending time bringing some of the benefits of playlists to a library-only world. Ocarina has always had song filtering, but I’ve only ever implemented simple keyword matching with regexes. I think that I should spend time developing better filtering rules. Specifying “artist contains ‘foo’ or artist contains ‘beatles’” directly in the library display would be more useful. I might even try to implement automatic filters for artist, album, genre, and year tags. Saving user defined filters would be useful, too…
I expect that I’ll use this site for writing about more than just Ocarina. We’ll see.
