I expect 0.6 to be released soon, which is gonna be our best release to date. It seems to be very stable and is extremely fast: a *lot* of optimization has been done since 0.5.3.

I am very pleased to see the interface work out as expected: the use cases I targetted with the first iteration of the interface are perfectly covered, and our new interface proposals addressing the biggest remaining problems will hopefully, once implemented, fill in the remaining cases. I wish MArk was still here to see it, we spent a lot of time trying to puzzle the "ideal music player" together ..

GStreamer

I have recently changed Muine's default backend from GStreamer to xine-lib. I am a big fan of the whole GStreamer project and I intend to switch back as soon as I think it is ready- however, I don't think it is quite there yet. I hope better performance (especially when opening a new stream), reliable seeking, and a more responsive, non-crackly pause are on the agenda for GNOME 2.8.

TagLib

TagLib, from the KDE camp, truly rocks. Small, fast, no external dependencies, proper unicode support, and extensible. I intend to use this in Muine once a few issues I pointed out have been resolved. Using it will allow us to get rid of a bunch of ugly code and their dependencies- and we'd get much more solid ID3 and FLAC support.

Gtk#

I can't wait till it supports Gtk 2.4. I'd love to use the new file selector, and the new combo box in Muine. :)

Distributions

I've been trying to find a distro to install on my gf's pc, next to Win XP. I need the installer to support NTFS resizing, so I decided to give SuSE a shot, also seen the Novell/Ximian stuff etc. I was extremely disappointed to find that I could not find any ISOs. Then I heard Mandrake supports NTFS resizing too, so I tried to find Mandrake 10.0 ISOs - no luck either. I find this a bit disturbing, it means I have to go to the store to buy a copy of SuSE, even though I am spending a lot of my free time doing development on software they ship ....