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Music Media

Sonique To Come To Linux 121

Posted by Hemos from the yet-another-player dept.
chrisbolt writes: "Check this out ... according to DMusic, the FAQ for the next version of Sonique says Sonique 2 will run on Linux! On top of that it will run on BeOS and MacOS, making it the most cross-platform mp3 player available." I'm still in love with XMMS, but have been playing around with other players recently -- and I've heard good stuff about Sonique.
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Sonique To Come To Linux More

Sonique To Come To Linux

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  • Sonique has it's problems (Score:3)

    by jon_c ( 100593 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @05:58AM (#758196) Homepage
    If you remember a while back it was exposed that winamp has a bug in it's "nitrone" engine that f*cks up mp3 decompression. Well from a link (i can't find offhand) Sonique has the similare problem; it doesn't decode the audio correctly.

    It's supprising that the two most popular mp3 players in the world can't do this correctly. XMMS which uses mpg123 works flawlessly, a dozen or so players based of the Xing Decoder or Xaudio decoder work fine. Why they use there own faulty mpeg decompression is beyond me.

    Another interesting thing about Sonique is it's visulazation SDK, it's being used or memiced is Real Jukebox and Windows Media Player 7. From what i understand you create a function that formats an array based of PCM data. that way it's platform, and format independet (if not a little slower). also the client app can host it in it's own window. Winamp by contrast simply gives you the PCM data and expects you to make a window and draw stuff on the screen. Personally i like winamps approch better, sience it opens up optinos for the plug-in writer like using directX or fullscreen mode, with Sonique and the like you don't have that control.

    On the other hand, porting a Sonique plugin to Linux may just mean recompiling it. so we'll see.

    I don't think Sonique will be better then XMMS, it's MP3 decompression is flawed, and is less open, (from a plug-in point of view, as well as OpenSource(tm)). XMMS is bassicly a winamp clone, it just needs more people to develop for it, make more DSP and visulation plugins. otherwise Sonique may be the one to use.

    -Jon
  • Since when did mp3 players become works of art? All I want to do is use it to play mp3s, so it practically doesn't need an interface. Now every mp3 player seems to have some mad skinning system, and a kajillion visualization plug-ins that I have never seen anybody use except to prove that they could. I'm as much a geek as anyone else, and love tweaking, but could it be that mp3 players have been done now, and only need maintenance releases?

    not_cub

  • What I like most about Sonique is the UI. It can be simple and uncluttered, or it can be baroque and hellishly complex, depending on what skin you select. It's got nice vis plugins, and a pretty average mp3 decoder.

    I've noticed a lot of people here complaining about eye candy, and to each their own, I suppose -- personally, I think that Linux is currently somewhat short of nice-looking apps, and that it could stand to gain a few. Not a judgement on Linux itself, just on Linux UI design.

  • Freeamp = Windows and Linux.
    Sonique2 = Windows, Linux, BeOS, and Mac.

  • ahhh grassshopper, wise man once say:

    Beware of software companies bearing gifts.

  • Actually, the Nitrane and Sonique decoding engines are quite error-prone. mpg123 and the fraunhofer decoders are the only ones proven to be the best. Check out this study [essex.ac.uk] which points out the differences in decoder quality. His methodology seems sound.

    zsazsafrazs
  • better engines out there, like Winamp's Nitrane

    Dude, you must be high. Nitrane is one of the worst decoding engines out there. Most people I've heard from have seen a noticeable increase in audio quality when switching from Nitrane to the Fraunhofer-based Winamp plugin from Winamp 2.22 [www.chat.ru] or the plugin based on mpglib from LAME [geocities.co.jp] (note that those two plugins have nearly identical output). You can see a comparison of a bunch of different decoders here. [robinson.org]

  • "Also, Winamp fits into a nice 274x114 space. Sonique looks as if it takes up over 400x400. "

    FWIW, I recall Sonique having a compact mode that took about 150x50px (could be wrong, it's been a year or two :-) that expanded a bit on mouseover. Not as compact as WinAMP's WindowShade mode, but not too bad.

    -aardvarko
    webmaster at aardvarko dot com
  • It just rolled out of my mind and off my tongue once I read that.

  • mp3 Decoder Tests Call Sonqiue "Terrible" (Score:3)

    by pbryan ( 83482 ) <email@pbryan.net> on Sunday September 24, 2000 @06:22AM (#758205) Homepage
    According to an extensive set of quality tests (see here [essex.ac.uk]), Sonique's results are terrible.

    Among the anomolies:

    • Skips samples during the first second of file, resulting in audible click.
    • Audible low frequency glitches in many files.
    • Faults in the decoding engine itself include audible mistakes below 15 kHz and a few mistakes above too.
    • The right channel is decoded correctly (only occasional 1-bit difference from l3dec), but the left channel is destroyed...
    • Sonique HQ decode mode also inverts the signal.
    It's overall recommendation:

    "Until the mp3 decoding is fixed, Sonique is a player to avoid. If you're using it to decode mp3s, stop!"

  • Now, could somebody please explain why the fuck do we need yet ANOTHER damn mp3 player, binary-only no less? We have, like FreeAMP, XMMS, gmpeg and some others, and that's only counting the ones that use gtk+; I'm sure there are a few for KDE too.

    Furrfu!

  • What are you using to track CPU usage? The only reliable CPU meter I've found for Windows is Wintop from the Win95 Kerneltoys package (it also works on Win98).
  • Otherwise, I'll continue to use the mpg123 engine for all my mp3 decoding needs.

    mpg123 is great, but it doesn't seem to support variable-rate MP3s. As these are the majority of what one seems to be able to download from MP3.com these days, I'm finding it really annoying to have to start X just to play some tunes, especially since I do all of my development work in console text mode.

    --

  • Am I the only one who finds gqmpeg the best X mp3 player? It doesn't suffer from the resource intensive aspects that XMMS does; plus its just a frontend to mpg123 (which we all know is the greatest console mp3 player)!
  • Isn't Sonique also closed source? Why would anybody be interested in seeing it on linux then?
  • Given that BeOS does not support arbitrary-shaped windows, a BeOS port of Sonique will either be using the BeOS port of X11 (which would suck), or it will not be using those cool morphing windows (which would suck too). Sonique and BeOS are both very nice, but I'm afraid a combination of the two won't make anybody happy...
  • Since Sonique .55beta came out, all the linux users who have gotten the chance to use Sonique on windows have been begging for a linux version. Not to mention this is the one reason I'm still in windows right now. When sonique is finally released for linux, hopefully sometime in early 2001, this will be a major deal for a number of reasons. First of all, it will bring the best sounding mp3 decoder to linux, which has always been a huge problem which has kept me from wanting to reboot to linux. Secondly, for those who know about Sonique, it's "liquid" feel would be amazing to see in linux, although I might be wrong, I think this will be a first for the Linux world. I'm very impressed with the sonique dev crew that they have spent the time to make their code very portable, it sounds like they have thought everything through in this new version to make a program that actually will dominate, as their egos would love it seems. So when Sonique is released for Linux, there will finally be a great looking, awesome sounding, mind bending media player that will make a lot of users stuck in Windows that demand great audio quality making the big switch.

    But lets look at Winamp 3.0 for a second, for those of you who have been reading NSDN, and the .plans you probably know already it is a very modular system. From what I can gather, Winamp3 could in fact be just as portable. The thing is though, they are aware that XMMS is basically the linux clone which does everything needed, so it seems they are putting their efforts towards a needed mac clone of the program. However, there is always the possibility we'll see a linux clone one of these days.

    There's only one thing that could make the fact sonique is being created for linux better: Open source.

    So, finally, after years of wanting a good mp3 player for linux, one that can really compete with the Windows ones, it seems we have it.
  • No. XMMS doesn't use 37 meg.

    You seem to be falling victim to the Mozilla Memory Escalation Misunderstanding. That is, under Linux, when a program has multiple threads, you _do not_ add up the memory usage of all the threads to get the total memory usage! The total memory usage is simply the memory usage of _one_ of the threads.

    Granted, some graphical process meters complicate things by automatically adding up all of the threads. Try using the textmode top to see what it is really using.
  • Oh yeah? I hereby present my own mp3 player, the Foo(TM).

    Unlike Sonique 2, this "Foo" program of yours is just vaporware.

    Once you get a slashdot story all to yourself, I'll believe this "Foo" program actually exists.

  • Re:"Ported to Linux"? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, I'm the one who has been doing the Linux porting, so I guess I can tell you this much: at various stages of development, Sonique 2 has been running just fine in Linux. Right now, since we're developing it rapidly, it's going to need some work to get it as good as the Windows version. But it DOES run. I'm going to have to rewrite some parts of the graphics code, since I'm using GDK and it seems to have some limitations (the main one right now is that when you change the size of a window it fills it with black which doesn't look very good) and I need to redo the font support. So although I have to put more work right now into the Windows version (this will be the first one that will be released) you can rest assured that this isn't just hot air. I don't even HAVE Windows at home. So you'd think that I would make sure that Sonique will be working in Linux at the first possible opportunity :) P.S. Sonique for Linux will run on pretty much any modern configuration. I don't depend on anything much that isn't standard in X. -- Nicholas Vinen, Team Sonique
  • mpg123 decodes mp3s properly? I have several mp3s that play just fine under Winamp (never tried Sonique), but that are heavily garbled or not played at all in mpg123.

    It might be true that mpg123 plays better mp3s that stick perfectly to the mp3 spec, but in practice, problems like that are much more annoying than any minor inaccuracy in decoded sound (which I assume is the nature of the flaw you were referring to).

  • they did for one version. but they then settled (I forgot whom) and got a lisence.
  • I use mpg123 0.59r to play VBR MP3s all the time. The only difficulty comes from some that I've created using LAME with tweaked-out options, which generates 'free-form' MP3 that mpg123 chokes on.

    The CVS version supposedly fixes this, but I've not tried it.
  • That's a pretty poor reality test. Like nothing mentioned on Slashdot ever turned up as vapor...
  • so how are they doing it ..gtk/qt/X ..with mpg123 what else do u need
  • Sure it looks cool and has a nice animated interface, but the most important feature to me seems to be the least important to whoever makes sonique. That would be playlisting and playlist control. Xmms has the best playlisting yet that I know of. Playlisting is the most important thing about an mp3 player. I'm unexcited, but i'll try it and i hope that sonique 2 has great playlist support.
  • If anyone wants really slick looking skins for xmms then you need to go to http://www.dgs.monash.edu.au/~timf/xmms/ and get the kjolfol plugin for xmms. I adds support for all kinds of cool sonique-ish skins, then go to customize.org and download some cool skins for it.
  • I was just wondering if this program was open source or not.

    -andy
  • In which case, use SoundJam.
    It decodes, encodes, has alpha-transparent skins, and IMHO, a *way* better UI than Audion. And is about to be released for OS X again (they pulled their earlier version to make sure it's compatible with the new Beta)
    Then again, I think a lot of these damn skins are friggin ugly and mostly useless: I mean ask yourself: how many time do I sit there *just looking at my MP3 player*?! I always load up the playlist and hide it.

    Pope

    Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
  • Notice how Windows wasn't mentioned along with Be and MacOS on the article? jeez.
  • Coming from an audio background, I can tell you that decoding engines are not all the same (not even for CD's, listen to a Wadia decoding engine sometime), especially for mp3. Everyone in the linux community is used to using mpg123 because it's open and free. That's too bad, cuz it rots compared to better engines out there, like Winamp's Nitrane, and Sonique's, which they call Stardust if I remember correctly. I am a linux and windoze user, and one of the frustrating things to me with Linux mp3 players is that they all use mpg123, and there's been nothing comparable to the better engines available on Windoze platforms. Hopefully this will be it.
  • That was a review on an older version. The current version is 1.63 and it has a new decoder called AE4.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • One of the questions asked was "Would the Linux community accept a program called 'WinAmp' or should we change the name?"

    And yeah, "LinAmp" was a favorite!
  • Incredible flexibility and customization options (like nothing ever done before).

    Oh yeah? I hereby present my own mp3 player, the Foo(TM).

    Where is it? Well, it's actually a blank text file. By offering you to program whatever you want into the program, it offers you incredible flexibility and customizations. One of the features that you can decide right away is "will it compile or not compile?" Foo can even be customized to be a word processing application if you want, or even an OS if you try really really hard.

    I bet no other mp3 players offer THAT kind of flexibility. The sky's the limit yo!

  • The best MP3 player for Linux is X Audio [xaudio.com] Runs on lots of other platforms too. It's not free though.....
  • Memory hog maybe, but not CPU. Sonique 1.63 right now on my W2K box is not quite taking up 1% of the CPU's time while using 10MB of memory.
  • And Lycos = BMG. Haven't they made a big stink about MP3 distrobution in Germany? I wonder if Sonique will start pushing a "secure" MP3 alternative at some time.

    --
  • On top of that it will run on BeOS and MacOS, making it the most cross-platform mp3 player available.
    Obviously somebody has never heard of mpg123 [mpg123.de] which runs on just about everything -- just about all of the *nix clones, Windows, OS/2. I don't see Mac or Beos (but a Beos port might be next to trivial.)
  • I'm using the Performance Monitor that comes with Windows 2000. Sonique right now is averaging 0.6%, that's while playing. I'll gladly try another monitoring program, Wintop won't work on Windows 2000.

  • Note to moderators. (Score:3)

    by TheReverand ( 95620 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @09:43AM (#758237) Homepage
    That was not a troll. That was flamebait. Please moderate it accordingly. Here is an example of a troll (for future reference)

    Well now that Sonique [freeamp.org] is on Linux [bsd.org], We can look forward to RMS screaming about how their source license violates the GPL. I'm tired of his communist antics. That bastard.

    Note, I am not a very good troll, for better ones, see the troll homepage [goatse.cx].

    Thank you.

  • Hmmm... maybe you should try a newer version of mpg123? I use mpg123 0.59r on both my LinuxPPC desktop machine and my Debian-i386 laptop and it does just fine with VBR...

    I encode all of my mp3's with LAME, using a high quality VBR setting (average bitrate is usually 160bps, min bitrate is 112bps, and max is 320bps)

    These files work well with winamp, mpg123, Sonique, XMMS, and mp3blaster (which, if you are fond of working in console mode, is a great text based player with playlist and everything... )

    (All above mentioned open-source programs [i.e., not winamp and Sonique] can be found by searching freshmeat [freshmeat.net], or on Debian just apt-get it :-) )

  • skin SUCKS. Why everybody is making this crap. I want a standard GUI player.

  • YAMP3P (Score:2)

    by Eil ( 82413 )

    Time for me to suit up, it's troll time...

    I've played with Sonique on windows, and best as I can tell, it is Yet Another MP3 Player, although with prettier skins. In a way, I dislike XMMS for being so heavy on the superficialities (that a word?), but I can't ditch it because I like it's functionality.

    Hey, I'll be porting my C-based wrapmail program to FreeBSD and Linux! Think that'll make it to /.? Didn't think so.
  • Froid didn't say it made sense, only that the RIAA should use it. Making sense is not a required paramter of RIAA arguments.
  • Thank God I just saw the goatse.cx thing in the status bar as I clicked, or I might have gotten an up close view of that thing. For anybody else who got their by accident, close your eyes, and put your hand over them. You should be able to view out the bottom. Slowly look up the screen to the tasklist, and close the window. This assumes you have set up your tasklist at the bottom of the screen.
  • From what I can tell, the scene has more or less given up on linux. . . secure OS in general aren't that friendly towards the kinds of stuff demo coders like to do, which often require more direct access to the hardware than linux wants to provide.

  • I don't get it. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Please explain to me what the big deal is.

    1) mp3 decoding doesn't take much CPU power anymore. Therefore, explain to me what this *awesome* decoding engine is, and how I'll notice a difference. Otherwise, I'll continue to use the mpg123 engine for all my mp3 decoding needs.
    2) Most good graphical players support WinAmp skins; therefore, they all have virtually the same interface. How will Sonique be different?

    What I'm *really* waiting for is the port of OpenCP to Linux. Cubic was the *best* mod player back in the day, and it played mp3's and midi's later on, too. And it had cool visualization... I'm sure that anything those guys put out would be 10x better than the crud we have now, *and* it'd be demo-style!
  • This is not true, the lawsuit was from Justin Frankel using his modified 'amp' engine without licencing. That is actually why he sold Nullsoft to AOL - to bail him out.

    Winamp 3.0 however will use the fronhoffer's engine.

    -Jon
  • Interoperability between the Windows and Linux versions hopefully will be good, because exchanging themes between the two versions of Sonique will hopefully be easier than exchanging themes between Winamp and XMMS.

    And will the amorphous window shapes have better luck under Linux because of differences in Windows and Linux display methods? That's a question u should think about.
  • This is most likely due to the first MP3 frame not being at the begining of the file. I've seen difference decoders handle this differently. I've seen Winamp mess up, and mpg123. It's a shame most don't really search for the valid MP3 header.

    This doesn't have anything to do with decodeing though, just finding the MP3 frame segments. mpg123 will do this correctly. Nullsoft's engine does not.

    -Jon
  • Here is the sonique faq [lycos.com].

  • Hey
    The skinsystem is cool tho, with sort of non-rectangular skins, for example, you can have a round Sonique. That's different from Winamp, where all basic layouts look the same square (boring).
    The also have some really nice vis's.
    Feels good it's coming to other OS's too.

  • Presumably, this will be closed source app. I don't like the idea of running what someone else wrote when I can't check it, as bugs could cause data loss.

    You sure did check every line of mpg123's source code. Right.

    --

  • So don't run it... I suppose you checked the entirety of the Linux source code before running that? Get a life, it's an mp3 player for Christ's sake--data loss my ass.
  • Just knowing that you can check the code is enough.
  • Great, I'm really excited.

    mumblemumblebloatedBuggymumblemumblewhoNeedsSkinsm umblemumblegoesGreatWit hEnlightenmentmumblemuble

    Let me help you moderate this: flamebait

  • You havn't been looking too hard (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So you think you have a choice between the over rated Sonique, or the crap XMMS?

    My God people, can someone please email the Geek compound a copy of FreeAMP? Win32 & Linux (And i believe, BeOS is in the works).

    Anyway, whats the big deal about Sonique? It's an MP3 player for Gods sake, as long as it plays MP3's, i'm happy.
  • It seems that all these media players are trying for eye candy. As long as it plays music that is what I care about.
  • Why bother waiting for cubic [opencp.org]? Granted it was a nice player, but Modplug [modplug.com] is presently the module player that's turning out the best output, and has the most features, and it's player engine has already been ported as an XMMS [xmms.org] plugin.

    Of course, neither Modplug nor XMMS are particularly demostyle, but I don't think Linux is a particularly scene oriented system. All those things that make it a "modern, secure, robust" operating system just get in the way of old-fashioned bare-metal coding. [scene.org]

    NE1 know of any 31337, scene based projects for Linux?
  • Are the moderators high this morning, or has someone slipped LSD into my morning Mountain Dew?

  • Here's one approach for the RIAA to take re: mp3 (Score:3)

    by Froid ( 235187 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @04:48AM (#758259)
    Why don't they declare mp3 encoding to be a form of encryption, thereby making all mp3 players (like Sonique [dmusic.com]) an illegal device whose sole purpose is to circumvent that encryption and decode the RIAA's copyrighted works? Since there are no legal definitions of what a legitimate encryption standard must entail, and since we're all aware that mp3s are entirely effective at preventing people with old Linux boxes from decoding them (less so for PCs and Macs, but the principle holds), it just might work. And more importantly, it would give the RIAA a legal leg to stand on in criminalizing all those copyright violations occurring right now, where non-DMCA law has been slow to act.

    Cheers,
    Froid
  • Interoperability between the Windows and Linux versions hopefully will be good, because exchanging themes between the two versions of Sonique will hopefully be easier than exchanging themes between Winamp and XMMS.

    What problems do you have with exchanging skins between Winamp and XMMS?
  • mpg123 sounds fine to me (although I'm not an audiophile), and it doesn't suffer from the Nitrane bug (see http://www.sulaco.org/mp3/winamp/winamp.html [sulaco.org] for details) that's cursed WinAmp for a long time now, making it painful to listen to any of my LAME-encoded MP3s...
  • What libc libraries, X libraries, KDE, Gnome, MS-Linux-Extensions, what? Is there some sort of "standard" configuration that one should have so that most of these ports will work?

    "In order to bring the product to the linux market faster, Sonique will require a special modified version of WINE to run in, and will have a memory footprint of 37.5 megs and require at least a P3-500..."

    Only kidding.... I hope....

  • Wow. Multi-platform==Linux! (Score:3)

    by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @05:18AM (#758263)
    You really do know what the appropriate title for this article should have been, don't you? Sonique to become multi-platform. I'm sure it wouldn't have been accepeted had it read like this...

    Sonique to come to BeOS:
    .......
    ....
    .....
    ......
    .....
    .....
    .....
    Oh, yea, and it will run on Linux and MacOS too.
  • There's a simple alternative when it's closed source: talk to the developers. I always give feedback to Paul Jaquays when I think something in Q3 could be improved upon. However, I hate the Unreal engine, and Tim Sweeney is too damn arrogant to change anything in it.

    I say you should try the program first. If something seems very wrong with it, contact whoever the company lists as a developer. If they list no one, then get that binary scum the hell off your hard drive!

  • I'd like to know how it'll handle modularization. I know that Sonique has a very fast, modular mp3 decoder, and I was wondering if that will be used (ported if necessary) or if it will use mpeg123. I hope it's the former. Also, will all the skins and visualization plugins be cross platform? That'd be sweet. I hope it has good ogg support...

  • Maybe I'm the only one to realize this, but Sonique is NOT OPEN SOURCE. It is CLOSED SOURCE. The source is NOT AVAILABLE on their website, if anywhere. Sonique, in fact, is owned by Lycos.

    Freeamp [freeamp.org], on the other hand, is a completely open source, GPL'd MP3 player, and it's already available for Linux and Windows. Plus, the themes are entirely controlled by an XML-based description file and a few bitmaps. I stopped using WinAmp when AOL announced it was going to include anti-piracy measures of some kind.

    Do the right thing. Use Freeamp [freeamp.org] instead. Yes, it's not perfect, but it's getting better daily, and it's OPEN SOURCE and FREE SOFTWARE, so you can do whatever the hell you want with it!

  • ...everyone else seems to have them.

    I've seen sonique... Sure, it's got pretty skins, but outside of that, XMMS 0wnz it. Xmms also has the benefit of maturity on Linux, so it'll probably be a lot more stable. What I'm wondering is: "when will xmms's UI be a plugin?" Everything else about xmms is based on plugins, so why not the UI, as well? With a couple of UI plugins, xmms could use any theme available.

    Would using plugins for the UI make xmms a "microkernel" application? :)

    Anyway, a previous post mentioned a visualization plugin [slashdot.org] for xmms, which I tried. It's almost good. But, trying to be a UI in a visualization plugin causes a few problems, like closing the application and restarting it with NO available UI. This would be a lot easier for developers and users if xmms's UI were a plugin, too.
  • But it was coded by Aliens!

    --
  • Yes! RMS is indeed a communist!
  • I know that quality of sound is important to most folks, but I use mpg123 simply because it doesn't suck memory like xmms, for an example, I fired up gtop and xmms, started playing an mp3, and xmms sucked up 37 Megs of memory, what a waste. Mpg123 uses a little over a megabyte while playing the same mp3. I like the gui, but until it gets a little more conservative with my precious resources, I'll stick to the command line.
  • OK. Being fixed.

    Being is future tense, therefore...
    As of right now, it still sucks.

    Xmms works fine for me, i see no need
    for a replacement.
  • Yes, it's not perfect, but it's getting better daily,

    Actually, I'd have to say it's near perfect - the only real programming task for a player is a nice song management unit, something that many players completely ignore.

    FreeAmp may support skinning and visualization and other pretty features, but I leave it in the default look, it can get small, stay on top, and listen to those sterio buttons on the new keyboards. Pretty good...

    But the playlist and MP3 file management works great. Scan your HD, or a directory tree, and it sorts them via your ID3 tags. Create, combine and drag and drop playlists.

    I went through just about every MP3 player on the Wintel platform about 3 months ago. Played with them each for about three days. FreeAmp has great sound, the best file management, and (as a real nice bonus now that I've relegated Windows to a corner desktop processing machine), looks exactly the same across OSes.

    My Linux install of FreeAmp looks *and* feels the same as the Windows version.

    --
    Evan

  • The RIAA would have to encode every song in mp3 and then they would have to replace every mp3 in the world with the mp3 that they encoded. Your idea doesn't make any sense at all.

    Chris Hagar
  • Sonique is pretty nice. The interface is very tight, smooth, and much more "artsy" (stuff slides and fades). The skins and vis are also dumb easy to install (with the player running) and full screen dancing shit is only a click away. There's also a cleary marked "save to disk" toggle, and you can switch between three different views to maximize screen use. It also has auto restart if you lose your stream cache.

    A couple caveats. I haven't found the "bookmark streams" button, and it doesn't seem to be connected to the cddb. I use it more often on my winbox now that winamp likes to report to aol whenever I fire it up.

    --
  • since it's attached to netscape now, and linux is the biggest supporter of netscape (since we don't have the #1 browser available)

    and ignoring all the people who want to kill linux by protesting any program that tries to come to the platform without opening all their source or releasing binaries for each of the 15,0000 possible linux setups, stuff like this is still good news. Hopefully, someday it won't be news anymore when an app comes to linux.

    ________

  • God dammit! Why the fuck do we need ANOTHER OpenSource UNIX clone when *BSD is already available!
  • We are also planning on supporting Windows. =)
    -cuthalion@sonique.com

  • On the other hand, porting a Sonique plugin to Linux may just mean recompiling it. so we'll see.
    That is correct. Also our package format will allow what ammounts to fat binaries for plugins. (one package can contain the plugin for a couple of platforms) Also note that there's nothing stopping a Sonique vis author from creating his own directx window, but that's not necessary to make them work fullscreen. (there's a "full screen" button in the Visual Mode screen)
  • We're not going to like implement every multimedia compression standard known to man. We only have like 6 coders, you know.

  • Re:I don't get it. (Score:3)

    by paRcat ( 50146 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @03:53AM (#758285)
    I'll continue to use the mpg123

    only thig is, most mp3 players that use mpg123, including xmms, are memory hogs.

    Most good graphical players support WinAmp skins...How will Sonique be different

    Try taking a look at Sonique. It's nothing like what you've probably seen if you think WinAmp is all there is. Sonique's interface is much prettier. And personally, I like it's UI better than any other player out there. It does have support for skins, but I'd rather leave it at the default.


    _______________
    you may quote me
  • Of course it's not vaporware. I can send you the blank file right now if you want. just cut and paste it to "foo.c" --> begin "foo.c" -- end "foo.c" see? I told you so.
  • Hey,

    the skinning system will make you "WET YOURSELF."

    Oh Good. Another MP3 player is availiable. With a skinning system. Now I can make sure that my MP3 player definately doesn't colour-coordinate with any of my other apps, all of which are done in Gray. Hopefully I'll be able to make the entire program display shadows-only on top of a background photograph of my choice, allowing me to stare at a photo all the time my MP3 player is the top window on my screen, me not being busy doing anything else.

    Hurrah!

    Michael

    ...another comment from Michael Tandy.

  • My company, eTantrum, ships a free player for Linux (and Windows) that (right now) does song identification as well as audio visualization, and it ships with a variety of killer skins.

    http://www.etantrum.com/index.php?section=downlo ad

    Also check out our GPL'ed Songprint song identification SDK at:

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/freetantrum/

  • "Ported to Linux"? (Score:4)

    by pen ( 7191 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @04:02AM (#758292)
    I've seen my share of "we're porting it to Linux" press releases, claims, and announcements. Does anyone know what this generally means? What libc libraries, X libraries, KDE, Gnome, MS-Linux-Extensions, what? Is there some sort of "standard" configuration that one should have so that most of these ports will work? The latest version of RedHat at the time, perhaps?

    It seems to me that one of Linux's strong points, its wide array of choices and openness, also happens to be one of its weak points at the same time. Please note, that I'm not trying to say that Linux sucks, or even anything remotely resembling that.

    What I want to ask is: Does anyone have any ideas on how to get rid of the bad aspects of that quality, while preserving its good aspects?

    --

  • Sure I thought the same thing before - "An mp3 player is an mp3 player - right?" But Sonique actually has BETTER sound quality than Winamp, or K-jöfol. A friend of mine pointed this out, but I didn't believe him until I sat down and compared the three. Sonique really had better sound quality(k-jöfol just plain sucked:p). On the visual side, the fact that the Sonique skins aren't restricted to a rectangular shape AND the fact that the buttons don't have to be in one specific place makes for some inventive designs - and I'm all for that. So stop whining about this new fancy mp3 player invading your system, if you don't want to use it - DON'T, it's as simple as that. Just my two cents
  • ...because Winamp has been great from the start. There's always MacAmp, the winamp port for the mac. And with XMMS, I feel right at home. Sorry, but I do like the oscilloscope/spectral analyzer output that Winamp gives to plugins. Also, Winamp fits into a nice 274x114 space. Sonique looks as if it takes up over 400x400. When all I care about is the sound, I want something nice and compact.

    P.S.: Ever notice how NONE of the new programs for X can ever be executed properly in 640x480, yet ALL of the programs in Windows can? (or at the very least they tell you if they can't.)

  • But like most mp3 players, it seems to have problems doing really simple things - like (gasp) dropping a bunch of files onto it and having them end up in the correct order (sorted by track). Sonique can't do it, WinAmp can't do it, the only ones I've seen that can are XMMS and SoundPlay for BeOS. I'll probably end up installing Sonique for BeOS, but mostly just for eyecandy - nothing can match the feature set of SoundPlay.

    -lx

  • File Formats (Score:3)

    by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @10:40AM (#758304)
    Sonique currently does MP3, plus a number of more closed file formats like WMA [Windows Media Audio].

    How will Linux Sonique support these file formats under Linux? Currently thes best technology has been the open soucrce reverse engineered version of Microsofts AviFile [http://divx.euro.ru/], which uses a small part of WINE and TWIN to call Windows-based media codecs, for MS MPEG 4, Intel Indeo, Cinepak, DivX, and other Windoes based file formats.

    Will Sonique port these file formats, or create a similar implementation to AviFile, or soemthing else?
  • And KJofol works really well on Linux too.


    (For those too young to remember, two years ago, KJ was supposed to be ported to linux too.)


    - A.P.

    --
    * CmdrTaco is an idiot.

  • There does happen to be an MP3 player which is fully functional yet does not use skins.

    Also, its playlist is extremely flexible.

    find -name '*.mp3' | while read filename; do mpg123 -b 1024 $filename

    Doesn't that just scream functionality!? Note the hyper-flexible playlist generator.

    No frills at all.

  • Clarification (Score:4)

    by Cuthalion ( 65550 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @01:55PM (#758311) Homepage
    Note: I am a coder at sonique. (proof [sonique.com])

    Let me clarify this a bit..
    1. Sonique2 is extremely portable and modular.
    2. We have had linux and BeOS versions compiling and running in the past. I think it's been a month or two since the BeOS version worked.
    3. We're not even going to try to support MacOS versions prior to MacOS X. Hell, the memory management isn't even thread-safe in MacOS 9!
    4. The linux version does not rely on libwine or anything dumb like that. Since we're doing all the Window stuff ourselves pretty much (except for the final blit to the screen) keeping things portable isn't so bad.

    Given our current user base, obviously the main development work happens on Windows boxes. However, we are all committed to portability.

    Oh, and WRT opening the source: We'd like to, but don't own the IP (when Lycos bought Sonique, well that made them own it.) so that question is not ours to decide. :(
  • Most of the Linux demosceners have more or less taken the TBL approach: give up on the whole "bare metal" idea and just make some cool look effects nonetheless. It's certainly not anywhere near as cool. You could try this site [planet-d.net] for an example.

    OpenCP would be very cool, though. MikMod is pretty good I must say, but a player just isn't a player without a few (dozen) FFTs.

  • Re:well (Score:2)

    by pen ( 7191 )
    Heh... how did I miss the day when Lycos bought Sonique?

    --

  • Mmmhhh, BeOS has native mp3 support, last time I checked. You can even drag'n'drop mp3 files into the CD-Burner app and they're automagically (and on the fly) converted into regular audio-CD tracks. Bah, one more cool app won't hurt!

    BeOS is really, really cool with media files. Being able to play as many mp3 files as you want *simultaneously* isn't bad, albeit not very useful. But it proves BeOS's multitasking excellence, since you can have several video feeds running along with 25 mp3's, with no apparent slowing down.

    With OpenGL, Java and BONE (BeOS Network Environment) coming, I *really* wish more software vendors would port their apps to BeOS. IMHO, BeOS is near perfect for a desktop OS. Boots in 10 seconds, is fast, doesn't crash, has friendly and polite advocates... but isn't Open-Source.

    Heck, half of /. is drooling over OS X, which isn't really GPL compliant either. Get some community support for BeOS, please! Port your apps!

    /max
  • Personally, I'm still dreaming of an MP3 player with standard widgets, good keyboard controls, and no skins! I've started hating WinAmp the day they switched to the new playlist. The old one didn't look nearly as pretty, but was much easier to work with. Now, they've all but forgotten that people out there use different character encodings.

    That's different from Winamp, where all basic layouts look the same square (boring).

    Not that I'm into skins, but does anyone know whatever happened to a0? At one point, the WinAmp crew was working on a cool-looking dynamic skin thingy called a0 for WinAmp, which came as a general purpose plugin for WinAmp. Anyone know what's up?

    --

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