Older blog entries for ensonic (starting at number 104)

buzztard

The packaging continued - I found a Gentoo overlay that has buzztard packages, as well as packages for Arch Linux. The later brought up some issues as arch Linux uses --as-needed when linking. An article in the Gentoo documentation suggests that its not a good idea to use this by default. To cut the long story short - normally (without that option) the order of libraries in the linker invocation did not really matter. When using --as-needed only libraries that are actually used are linked in. To make that work one has to put needed libraries behind libraries that need them. If you want to try this on your own software: LDFLAGS="-Wl,--as-needed" ./autoregen.sh

The Debian packages that have been made recently are nice too. All packages undergo various checks, among a spell-checker of strings in binaries.

As planned I worked a bit more on undo/redo. I have it now implemented and in use for some case in the pattern editor. I also added unit tests to verify the stack logic.

I also managed to finished some work I had started at the Linux Audio Conference - copy and paste of machine parameters between patterns and the machine property window.

54 files changed, 2174 insertions(+), 699 deletions(-)

buzztard

It is nice to see that more and more distros have buzztard packages. Many thanks to Sebastian Dröge for submitting packages to Debian and Ubuntu.

Latest GStreamer releases (gst-plugins-base-0.10.28) have my adder fixes. With those trick playback in buzztard works much better. Scrubbing is not locking up any more and we can play the score forward and backward at different speeds. There seems to be still an issue in more complex songs though. Every time the playback accelerates, the sink is waiting for something and thus there is a pause.

One major feature I'd like to have for 0.6 is undo/redo and journaling. The latter is important to minimize the loss of data in case the application or the system crashes. I have been thinking for quite a while how to implement it and came to the conclusion that it can be made so that journaling means having a serializable redo stack. I have now started to write the code for it. Hopefully more news on how it went soon.

48 files changed, 2240 insertions(+), 351 deletions(-)

buzztard

I will give a talk about "Writing audio applications using gstreamer" at the Linux Audio Conference 2010. Naturally quite some time went for writing the article. Now that it has been accepted, I need to start working on the slides and demos.

In buzztard I've tried to make the life of people that use jack or pulse a bit easier. The problem here is that the player is only visible in jack/pulse when it is actually playing. I have now some code that keeps the sink alive (in GST_STATE_READY). This allows e.g. changing the volume in pulse or routing the output in QJackCtrl even if the app is not playing. Unfortunately it only works after the sink was in playing once. I need to confirm my theory of what wrong still.

I recently brought a netbook (MSI L1300) and thus wanted to try buzztard on this machine. I have installed moblin 2.1 on it to play with moblin. As usual, installing own software on a new linux distro/machine always brings up something. After a few rounds of configure maintenance and dependency trimming I am set and having it running. Performance seems to be okay even for complex songs. Yay!

Besides that, I fixed a few more bugs and wrote more tests.

gtk-doc, xslt and profiling

As part of the endless journey of getting gtk-doc to spit out the docs faster I managed to get xsltproc from libxslt to output full callgraphs. The output is compatibe with oprofile and thus the same tools to rendering can be used (e.g. gprof2dot). Bit sadly me profiles hit a python assertion in the above code which I have to disable to run it, buug filed but dormant since 1 month. Same for the xsltproc patch, the patch and an example image is here but no reviews so far.

Now the way to make gtk-doc faster would be to make the xslt faster and as I can see from the profile, this could be done, by preprocessing the xsl with some variables set. Right now I have not too high hopes on this as libxslt seems quite dormant and this is not so straight forward :/

buzztard

As if February isn't short enough already, a nasty stomach infection send me to the couch (and bathroom) for a couple of days.

Still managed to do a couple of things. Some refactoring in the editor allowed me to harmonize context menus, e.g. one can open machine windows also from pattern and sequence view.

GStreamer has support for accelerated and decelerated playback, forward and backward. I started to overhaul the seek handling a bit and added UI for fast- forward and fast-backward. Fast-forward is working with some limitations, but reverse playback needs some fixes in plugins still. As a side effect one can now scrub with the mouse over the timeline.

I also wrote a standalone test app for my level meter. I was still not convinced that is was always drawing correctly. Indeed there was a bug in the resize behaviour, that now is fixed too.

As gtk+3 comes closer I did several rounds of adapting the the new style to use accessor functions everywhere.

44 files changed, 1087 insertions(+), 317 deletions(-)

buzztard

I couldn't really concentrate one a single task this months. Thus I ended up with lots of small changes here and there. First obvious change is that buzztard got an over-engineered tip-of-the-day dialog. I takes extra care to present tips in random order, without repeating tips before you have seen them all. I also played a bit with parasite - the cool gtk ui introspector and noticed that my dialogs are inconsistently layouted. Well, fixed now.

Besides I did lots of small cleanups and refactorings. GStreamer pipelines load faster as I now link pads directly (not elements). This also gives me better diagnostics if it goes wrong. I could get rid of some dead code, removed a lot of double checking and generally lowered the amount of gobject runtime type checks. I also turned some more objects into proper gobject singletons. This way I don't need to pass them around anymore.

Finally I wrote some test code in preparation of adding device selection to the audio settings (like selecting the alsa device). Need to make a plan of how to store the selection for multiple sinks.

173 files changed, 6014 insertions(+), 5939 deletions(-)

gtk-doc

I worked most of the December time on gtk-doc. After more that a year I released 1.12 and 1.13 on the same day:). Most notable features are probably that now one can have syntax highlighted and xreffed examples and the generated indexes have a prefix detection. That means the index has proper a,b,c sections and not everything under 'g' for for gnome libraries. The best thing - you don't need to do anything, just update your gtk-doc version. Now I hope that someone kindly installs 'highlight' (or 'gnu-highlight') on the server that runs library.gnome.org (or do we need them on build.gnome.org?) so that we get the highlighted docs there too.

Now if you want to do something, have a look at these two commits and do the same in your package. It helps maintenance and it builds faster. If you want even more speedups go for gtk-doc from git head. I managed to tweak the xslt to save a third of build time. I mostly replaced some templates to avoid i18n which the api-docs don't use anyway, but also cached some nodesets.

buzztard

On buzztard I also spent a little time, improving the docs and pushing the test coverage further. I will attack the bullets on the 0.6 roadmap next. Happy new year and stay tuned.

gtk-doc

I went over pending bugs and fixed a couple more parser errors. The testsuite is definitely helping. The I also had a stab on one feature request - print warnings for failed xrefs. This would be helpful to fix typos in the doc comments that were intended as links, but don't become ones. It was easy to add the warnings, but unfortunately it produced lots of false positives. This is mainly because gtk-doc also creates implicit links. Almost one week later I had most of them under control and now the amount of false positives is quite low. I pushed my ohloh score by fixing the found issues already in gstreamer core/base and in buzztard. You can do the same in other libs. If noone complains any further I intend to release gtk-doc 1.12 this year still :)

buzztard

I made a nice change to the pipeline graph builder - It now uses a fixed internal format (float 32bit). This allows us to avoid plugging audioconvert elements in wires and machines. Now we plug them only if the machine cannot support the internal format. This gives 7 -> 1 sec speedup for load & play of e.g. Aenathron.bmx.

In general also plain to wav rendering is now quite fast. On my AMD64 @ 1.8GHz the 11:45 min. song renders in 45 sec. and on my Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.0GHz it takes 28 sec..

The rest of the month I spent a lot of time on project maintenance, improving the api-docs and writing more test. Regarding the latter, I got the test coverage improved a lot. Writing automated tests for some areas is quite tough though.

Then I also made a small change in the UI. All context menus can now be invoked via a popup menu button in the toolbar above (machine, pattern and sequence view), this makes it more usable on touchscreen devices.

upstream hacking

I started the month with upstream bugs work. First I looked into #581873, made a fix and two days later realized that my git checkout was on a stale branch and its already fixed in gtk+-2.18. Next I looked at the mime matching issue that is already plaguing me for a while (#541236). I also have a patch for that and hope that I get green light for it or a review how it should be fixed instead.

buzztard

In buzztard I implemented copy and paste in sequence. I also found our what I did wrong in my clipboard handling code (see my previous post). Dunno what wrong with the old code, but this change made it work:


GtkClipboard *cb
-cb=gtk_clipboard_get_for_display(gdk_display_get_default(),GDK_SELECTION_CLIPBOARD);
+cb=gtk_widget_get_clipboard(widget,GDK_SELECTION_CLIPBOARD);

Next I finally got rid of the gnomevfs hard dependency. It is only needed if you have a quite old gtk to get help working. While testing I noticed that some translations disappear during run time. I made some i18n handling fixes regarding to initialisation and libraries.

I am probably the last one to figure that one has to draw with the 0.5 px offset in cairo to get non blurry gfx. After Matthias post I looked at my vu-meters and voila, I was doing it wrong. Fixes are in svn together with some small optimizations.

buzztard

After a release it is always not so easy for me to pick what I will work on next. I decided to look into copy'n'paste as this is crippling usability right now. This sounds like a trivial thing to implement, but its not. Its partially difficult because the gtk documentation on that matter leaves a lot to answer. With the help of the sources I got it implemented for patterns. One thing that worries me right now is that I use GDK_SELECTION_SECONDARY instead of GDK_SELECTION_CLIPBOARD (which seems to be the recommended one). In my case I have a custom widget to edit structured data. I serialize the data in a textual form, but use an own mime-type for copying, as its kind of pointless to paste it into e.g. your editor. The mime type thing works. To debug it, I can also provide the data as text and then I can paste it in some text editors. What puzzles me is that if GDK_SELECTION_CLIPBOARD is used, gtk+ seemingly randomly post a GDK_SELECTION_CLEAR in gtk_widget_event_internal() and that clear my copy before I have a chance to paste the data. It has something to do with a "selection-clear-event", but again that's only partially documented and the other related events are not documented at all.

Besides a few bug fixes, I also did more optimisations on song-loading. There are still a few candidates for more optimizations, but some of them require quite substantial refactorings. Some of the improvements I already did were on the gstreamer side and they are now in the official tree (some already in 0.10.25 release and some in the next one).

buzztard

The buzztard team has released version 0.5.0 "crown of thorns" of its buzz-alike music composer. All modules got extensive improvements over the last release from almost a year ago. Give it a try, join hacking and report bugs.

[project-page] [screenshots] [downloads]

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