My school work has been slowing me down alot, but Squash is finally almost ready for the 1.0 release.

Things that have changed since 0.9, are:

Squash can turn the empeg off and adjust the brightness of the display.
Squash now has a menu system and can display the currently playing song and the upcoming songs. You can also see the statistics of a song, and skip songs preemptively from the upcoming songs (I am not resposible if you run into a tree or poodle while doing this!).
Buffered audio and tuning, so no skips! (yeah!)
Supports for FLAC!
And basic remote controls. (Skip, Play/pause and volume)

Just as a reminder Squash supports MP3's, OGG's and FLAC. It can use the existing player's database, or you can just send it files over ftp/rsync without needing any sort of special (and annoying) database tools.
Squash also picks songs automatically based on statistics of how often you skip a song versus let it play.

Things that still need to be done before 1.0 release:
More user configurable variables, and setting those in the player, not just the config file.
Manual Ratings (don't trust computers to do the dirty work for you?)
General code cleanups.

And last, I recently got the hijack toolchain to work, so that means squash can run with shared libraries, which is quite nice. This new (actually -old-) toolchain also works correctly with OGG's library, so now I can seek and tell the total playtime of an ogg file.

On a final note if you would like to test out this version of squash let me know and I'll furnish you a copy. Also if there are any features that you think are just absolutely required before a respectable 1.0 release, tell me here! And if you just have regular priority features put there here too.

Thanks for any and all support in the past or future. I've been using squash in my car for the past 3 months now and I like it alot (of course, though, since I wrote it ).

Ciao,
Gryn

I'm dying to play FLACs. Can I try? Heh.
I've got a Mk2a with two 40GB disks in it.

Defiler,
Certainly, I'm getting a prerelease package together today and I'll include you in on it.

1.0pre1 of Squash has been released on sv.gnu.org . PLEASE read the docs.

I don't see it ?

msaeger:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/squash/

Any chance on getting AAC support in squash? There's a free set of AAC tools at http://faac.sourceforge.net/ that you might be able to incorporate.

This would actually give you a leg up on the factory player. I'd love to see the devs incorporate AAC into the player as well, but I can understand their reluctance to license it. If the faac tools are any good, maybe those could get integrated in V3 (and hell, put them in the karma codebase too and save those licensing fees too!)

-- Gary F.

Hi Gary,

I looked into it (downloaded that library). Well, the good news is that it's definately doable (assuming the library works you know, since I don't have any AAC files). The bad news is that it may just be a worse library interface, even worse than libmad (the mp3 decoder library I use).

<RANT>I'll end up adding support of course, but I'd like to complain at this point. libfaad seems to be in the same ballpark as libmad, i.e. no documentation, very clumsy interfaces -and- external tagging libraries which are just as clumsy (id3lib sucks under C).

Why can't they be like FLAC at least, which at least -has- documentation (albiet confusing and autogenerated) and at least attempts to not be clumsy.

And FLAC is still not so hot. If you want to see the -best- library inteface in the world, with the -best- documentation, go look at libvorbisfile (OGG decoder). It's just candy for developers. It impassions me so much, that I just can't imagine what these other libraries were thinking. (Frighteningly making me want to write a sonnet for it; imbueing words with the virtues of a well formed audio library.)</RANT>

SO, ANYWAY, I know you had -no- interest in that last bit; but I just wanted to let off some steam about bad libraries. I'll probably add AAC support assuming it's a working library and I can get/create some test AAC files. But I'll probably do that after 1.0 release.

For those curious, what is left for 1.0 is a completely revamped user inteface (since I seem to be the only one who likes it, oh well ) and manual rating of songs. Along with these two are a bunch of screens where you can change most of squash's settings in the player. (You know, basically all the number settings -- text settings may be a bit difficult to set right now without coding a file browser interface).

and save those licensing fees too!

Does using FAAC release one from paying patent licensing fees to Dolby?
Does using FAAC allow one to play Apple's DRM-protected AAC files, without paying a license fee for that?

Of course not, and you know it. I don't even think it supports DRM at all, although it does support something called Digital Radio Mondiale, which they convieniently abbreviate DRM.

And since the only reason anyone wants AAC support is to play tracks downloaded from the iTunes store, it's ultimately useless, at least until someone defeats Apple's DRM in a more convenient way than myTunes or QTFairUse.

Of course not, and you know it.

Yes. I do. My questions were (hopefully) phrased to make that obvious, and to disabuse anyone of the notion that the car player is ever likely to get AAC support, let alone play iTunes Music Store downloads.

I think it unlikely that the Karma will ever play iTMS downloads either, seeing as Apple apparently see it as a loss-leader to sell more iPods.

unlikely that the Karma will ever play iTMS downloads either

...particularly when one observes that Rio already has a list of preferred music download partners.

I think it unlikely that the Karma will ever play iTMS downloads either, seeing as Apple apparently see it as a loss-leader to sell more iPods.

Wow, I never thought about it that way... But you're right. And it's the exact reverse of the traditional model where they practically give away the hardware in order to make money on the underlying content (radio, TV, the Internet itself.)

This makes me wonder, are there any other examples of successful business models involving selling content at a loss to sell hardware for profit??? I can't think of any obvious ones off the top of my head.

(Apologies in advance for hijacking this thread...)

This makes me wonder, are there any other examples of successful business models involving selling content at a loss to sell hardware for profit??? I can't think of any obvious ones off the top of my head.

I doubt they're making a significant loss, they're just not making any money. Their margin comes from iPods sales.

Word on the street is that *nobody* is making any money from online content, except the labels. It's early days though..

Rob

The bad news is that it may just be a worse library interface, even worse than libmad (the mp3 decoder library I use).

Well that's ironic, since libmad was started as a replacement player for the empeg car. I haven't seen Rob Leslie on the BBS for a long time so he probably won't get a chance to respond to your criticism.

Rob

After savannah getting back online, do you plan to setup the project anytime soon? I have a second player and I want to both test your software & help developing (if I can).

I think your project deserve a LOT more attention as it's the only way to get 100% control of our hardware, not just sit and wait features that (maybe) we will just dream forever.

Happy Christmas!

I'm glad I have the excuse of savannah being offline to cover me for not releasing yet -- the truth is I've been lazy and haven't done much during the holidays. However, after "finishing" (read, postponing) most of my TODO items, I'm down to two simple ones: updating the documentation and writing a simple install script.

Once I get off my butt and do that 1.0 will be released.

But the "bad" news is that I've decided that the overall design of squash is not very good. I mainly blame threads. Therefore, 1.1 and beyond will be drastically restructured to not use threads. The goal is to move to a multiprocess model as a (hopefully) more structured and extendable organization than a threaded one.

Btw, please don't take this as an attack on threads. I just don't seem to be able to work with them and keep squash from being a matainance nightmare. But for people wanting more or less some reasons why I don't want to use them please refer to the actual code (which you can see is a mountain of locking) or "The Art of Unix Programming", I'll start you out in chapter 7:

http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch07s03.html#id2923889

To DJZorrow: I'm really glad to hear you would like to help and I would like all the help I can get. Of course right now squash is about to be torn down and rebuilt and at the most unopportune time (i.e. I'm about to start a job at the beginning of the year).

So anyway, Merry Christmas everyone. And remember all spelling mistakes are the responsibility of the giant space baby.

-Gryn

I totally understand your reasons for not wanting to program in threads, but I'd like to point out that the empeg designers have stated that the use of threads provides significant improvements on the empeg platform over multi-processing.

That's what threads are good for, a performance boost. But I believe I can get squash to run on the strong arm just fine.

(Right now, the most significant overhead from moving away from threads will be the spectrum analyser, which isn't even present in the current empeg version of squash. And I think that I could used shared memory or think of something, if performance becomes a problem -- we'll build that bridge when we get there).

I'm mainly concerned with the influence threads has on the design. I think I can get a good multi-programming design going that may actually load the processor less (because I think I will have traded off locking overhead for less IPC overhead).

Anyway, wish me luck; right now things aren't looking good as my car broke down and so my radio is with it in another city.

On savannah I can't still get squash: when you have the time (I don't want to make pressure, really), drop a message.

My second "development" empeg runs just fine: I think I will open a little web page too

Thank you again for your time.