Out of some irc conversation, I gave implementing synced meters a go. Until so far level and spectrum meters in buzztard were ahead of time. The reason is that gstreamer tells me about the values once they are computed, but that's not when the actual data segment gets played. Luckily the message has a timestamp. So all it needs is to sync drawing with the audio sink. MikeS gave me some good pointers on irc. It wasn't that straight forward. I found and fixed a bug in level meter plugin so that it now puts useful timestamps on messages when it play loops. It works really great now.

gtk_widget_grab_focus() is a nasty function. It asserts when the widget is not mapped/realized and steals the focus in any case. This is problematic if you have tabs and update widgets when things changed. I now have a wrapper added that does the extra checks. Wonder if that would be a good change for upstream.

I did lot of testing with real buzz songs and machines. I have now about 80 original plugins in use. Real testing always leads to some good fixes :) We now add an empty pattern by default when adding new source machines (like buzz did). I also noticed that bpm/tpb information was not loaded from buzz songs. This is now fixed (also master volume was missing). After that I spotted that most bpm tempi did not work well. Now timing precision is much better.

project namespaces

A big recommendation to everyone. Pick a decent prefix for your project. I've been a bit blue eyed and had chosen 'bt'. Part of my package is a core library called libbtcore. Now unfortunately ktorrent did the same mistake and have a libbtcore (bt stands for bittorrent there). As neither of them are really general purpose they should be uniquely named. I analyzed all files I install and went thought the great pains of renaming everything - libs, binaries, docs includes, pkg-config files, desktop files and so on. Hope I never have to do that ever again. I also filed a bug for ktorrent so that they can fix it before its causing problems. Interesting how they dealt with the report - "I was first with libbtcore - RESOLVED AS WONTFIX". Interestingly I was 1.5 years earlier, but that wasn't the point at all.