Re: I don't get it.

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Re: I don't get it.
by Carbon on Thursday 21/Feb/2002, @22:03

Noatun does not play music! Arts plays music! Noatun is a frontend to arts. I don't get why no one understands this. I have quite a few disagreements with Neil myself, but I'm on his side on how much you people just don't seem to absorb the fact that Noatun does not play DVDs or MP3s or anything like that. It just tells aRts to do it, which handles everything that's related to audio (with the possible exception of streaming, but that's another story).

The playlist can be skinned, if someone would bother to develop a skinnable playlist. For instance, you could probably build an xmms playlist, that emulates the functionality of XMMS playlists, and can load XMMS skins. Why you'd want to do this is beyond me, but even using QT based playlists, you can just change the QT theme. And I thought you weren't concerned about anything but playing music anyways.

Uh, no one downloads and installs Noatun plugins because Noatun is OSS and has very few plugins at the moment, so all the good ones come with it anyways (Flood isn't one of the good ones btw, since without Icecast or something along those lines, it doesn't do much).

Yes, if someone wants to extend noatun, they can download it and patch, but what if the feature they want to implement conflicts with one already implemented? It would be impossible to properly, for instance, implement a file system based playlist over a hard coded flat playlist. It just couldn't be done without plugins. The whole point of plugins is they can be interchanged and modularized and make scalabilty easier, not that you can download them if you want to add something later (though this is an added benefit).

*Huff*Puff* :-)

Related Links

·   Articles on Multimedia
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Re: I don't get it.
by not me on Friday 22/Feb/2002, @11:57

Noatun is the program people use to play music through aRts. There, is that pedantic enough for you? I don't see how the method Noatun uses to produce sound from the speakers is relevant anyways.

The problem is that the playlist is separate from the rest of the interface, unlike every other music player on the face of the planet. So say you want a Winamp skin loader. It can't have a Winamp style playlist unless you also make and separately activate a Winamp-skinnable playlist. Then if you want the equalizer, you need another equalizer plugin (is this even possible?). I think it's silly. Why not just program the interfaces (and/or playlists) directly into Noatun? That way its easier to program, the components can have more interaction (like ID3 editing more integrated with the playlist), and you can activate/deactivate whole interfaces at once instead of piecemeal. Noatun could still have a modular design, so for example you could replace the playlist engine (though I think that no music player should ever need more than one playlist, but that's a different story). Plugins are not the only way to make a modular design. I just think the current design is TOO modular, making Noatun needlessly complex and non-integrated, for the user and the programmer.

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Re: I don't get it.
by Charles Samuels on Friday 22/Feb/2002, @12:40

Yes, you're absolutely right! Why have a versatile media player when I could have one that's exactly like every other media player?

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Re: I don't get it.
by not me on Friday 22/Feb/2002, @14:26

Well, I'm fairly certain I'm not advocating building an inflexible media player, or a media player that's exactly like any other media player. But don't let that stop you from making inane remarks.

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Re: I don't get it.
by Troy on Saturday 13/Dec/2003, @11:16

Its hardly inane. The fact that the playlist, equalizer, etc,. are plugins allows for the possibility of new and unique ideas in those areas to be implemented relatively painlessly. You wish to lose that functionality for the purpose of skins. While I have no hatred of skinning in and of itself, I don't know why thats so important that this unique quality of noatun should be sacraficed.

-troy

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