Ann: Cynthiune 0.9.2

[Wolfgang Sourdeau]

Hi all,


This is to let you know that Cynthiune 0.9.3 (GNUstep only) was just released.

What is Cynthiune?
------------------
Cynthiune is a free software and romantic music player for GNUstep and
MacOSX. I wrote it originally as a christmas gift to a girl that I liked
because she could not listen to the music on her Mac with a free program.

It is very similar in use to XMMS and Winamp, although it is currrently
less complete. A plugin architecture is being designed.
For the moment, input and output bundles can easily be written and
Cynthiune is already quite usable for playing Ogg's, MP3's, Mod's an
plenty of other formats to an OSS device or an Esound socket.

Changes
-------
This release is a recommended update:
- do not interpret command-line arguments starting with "-" as songs;
- a bunch of new supported file formats were added:
  - added the Mod format module relying on libmodplug (thanks to Rob
    Burns), adding support for 23 types of tracker file formats (mod, s3m, ...);
  - added the AudioFile format module relying on libaudiofile, adding
    support for 7 types of uncompressed sound formats (wav, aiff, ...);
  - added the FLAC format module relying on libflac, adding support for
    the Free Lossless Audio Codec;
- factory methods return autoreleased object by default, to comply with
  the coding standards;
- reworked the player interface;
- eradicated the memleaks (thanks to Ludovic Marcotte);
- the column headers can now be used to sort the playlist in ascending
  and descending orders;
- UTF16'd language dictionaries;
- dropped embryonic support for OpenStep 4.2;
- the timer is reversed directly when clicked;
- when changing the selection in the playlist, the total time taken by
  the songs is displayed during one second;
- the default playlist is saved in <User's Library>/Cynthiune/Playlist
  rather than in the defaults database (migration is transparent);
- loading the default playlist is made faster by the use of
  NSKeyedArchiver/NSKeyedUnarchiver.
- supported extensions appears case-insensitively in the open dialog;
- fixed the display of UTF8-encoded song metadata;
- added Italian translation (thanks to Roberto Pariset);
- MacOSX users can select whether Cynthiune will display textured or
  regular windows;
- the Esound and OSS drivers are no longer threaded, this makes the
  playing of songs faster to start since no lock has to be instantiated.
- the output bundles and the output mechanism were redesigned and made
  simpler, cleaner;

Downloads
---------
The current version (0.9.3) can be downloaded from
http://organact.mine.nu/~wolfgang/cynthiune/Cynthiune-0.9.3.tar.gz

Screenshot:
http://organact.mine.nu/~wolfgang/cynthiune/cynthiune-0.9.3.jpg

Requirements
------------
The extra libraries needed for Cynthiune are:

mp3 support:
- libid3tag and libmad 0.15.0b
  (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=12349)
ogg support:
- libvorbis 1.0.1 and libogg 1.1.0
  (http://www.vorbis.com/download_unix_1.0.1.psp)
mod, xm and all the possible tracker formats out there:
- libmodplug 2.04 (http://modplug-xmms.sourceforge.net)
wav, au and many uncompressed sound formats:
- libaudiofile (http://www.68k.org/~michael/audiofile/)
flac support:
- libflac (http://flac.sourceforge.net/)
esound output support:
- libesd (http://www.tux.org/~ricdude/download.html)

Cynthiune is my first GNUstep project and my coding style has changed
over the year during which I wrote it. Therefore, if you have any code,
ideas, translations, comments or useful criticism, feel at ease to submit
them to me!

Cynthiune has matured a lot in the recent months. A couple of features
are incomplete but since the changes to come are complex and important,
I thought a preliminary release would still be nice to have. Consider
this software beta.

Happy thiuning!


Wolfgang
-- 
"An eye for an eye only makes the world blind." (Ghandi)