But I do have some presents for my users.. First of all, the CVS version of xine-lib now has a lot of fixes for those bugs that were reported on SourceForge and I could fix. And as second present, it now plays not one but two new lossless formats: WavPack and True Audio; the first depends on the wavpack library to demux the files but uses FFmpeg to decode the audio stream, while the latter uses a standalone demuxer and again FFmpeg to decode.
I was working on getting WavPack to work since at least last July, being finally able to play those files made me very happy… I hope also my users will be happy. Also a big thanks to aumuell from Amarok team who’s working on getting their internal TagLib plugins to read tags for those formats, too, so that Amarok will support them entirely.
While bragging about the two new formats supported in xine on #amarok, an user also gave me a MusePack file that doesn’t currently play with xine.. The problem was that it used a misterious SV 7.1 version that wa skipped by xine.. Fixed now by accepting 7.x versions. And again while fixing this, I noticed our current musepack software status being bad and thus decided to update it. So libmusepack, the obsolete name for 1.1 series of the decoding library has been masked, pending removal next month, in favour of libmpcdec; and I added mppenc, that replaces upstream the musepack-tools package, although missing the player, that now uses cmake… As the mppdec sources are not available upstream, I’ll add mpc123 for who needs a commandline player.
Don’t forget to fight for your rights to be able to use a namely free software by mailing Nero, if you didn’t already.
On a slightly bothering note for me, my DVD±RW seems to be giving up.. I couldn’t rip the Ireland CD a friend of mine gave me for Christmas into FLAC files, and I’m not sure if it depends on the reader or if it’s FLAC not working as it should.. I should probably try with WavPack or True Audio (if I can find a TrueAudio encoder of course) so that I could also use the new features in xine and Amarok 🙂