Hi everyone! I hope we haven't thrown a towel and given up. For some kick-start to revitalize Jokosher development, I did some Jokosher bug review, to see big picture.
Using Launchpad bug list and testing additionally Jokosher with newest Gst CVS, I have made three clearly separated groups of bugs: 1. Most important ones, as seems to me, are seeking bugs, as they usually ends with crashes and freezees. For now, most visible ones is: a) import FLAC file, split in five, seven or more pieces and make them separated with few sec of silence, playback and then do seeking without pressing stop; b) import FLAC/MP3 file, play it and after playhead has reached end, seek it back (without pressing stop) for 5 secs and do it several times. FLAC produce freeze after three four times, MP3 produced crash after some six times, but I was unable to reproduce later; c) also with FLAC, playing back without seeking forwards and backwards is OK, however when I start to do actively seeking forward/backward _while playing_, first it confuses pieces (plays another one instead of first one) and later, crashes or freezes; After extensive testing, it seems that seeking problems mostly affects FLAC; MP3 seeking crashes are less predictable and rather hard to reproduce, but they happen. Ogg Vorbis however drops some sec from beginning of each seperated piece, and have imprecise waveforms, but it survives insane seeking test and don't produce freeze/crash. At the time of testing WAV seeking was broken in Gstreamer CVS, but thanks to efforts Gstreamer team, it was fixed in one day and so it works like a charm again, so no bugs here. In short, seeking is good in Wav, Ogg Vorbis (however, it has waveforms are out of order, and beginning of pieces are not played back); random, but rare crashes/freezes with MP3; FLAC seeking bugs are reproducible quite easy. 2. Second is general playback/record problems, First of all, Ogg Vorbis streams (which is default dump format by know) playbacks/records very badly if there is more than just one instrument added to project (cracks, hisses, etc), waveforms are also out of order, and start of pieces are not played back. None of this doesn't affect FLAC, MP3 and Wav. End of recording gets snapped for FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. Also I think error dialog informing that there is some problem with playback/record pipeline should be revised, also we need to stop pipeline and clear the field, because now it stops, issues error dialog, but still has some lingering processes in background. After these two groups it seems that it would be sane to set WAV as default dump format for now. Of course, work on improving support for rest of formats should continue, as people will import lot of mp3/oggs/flacs into their projects. Maybe we can import them as WAV too. 3. Gstreamer/ALSA problems. After still unable to playback anything with my multichannel sound card, I did a little research for myself what 'plughw' device actually means. In result, I got Jokosher to playback with custom 'alsasink device=plughw:2' string. However, it failed to playback when I choosed ALSA and then device. I hope it's not serious bug though. So if we fix Jokosher to playback everything trough plughw to any device, it should work. With recording there is kinda simple situation - recording from device with one mono channel works and that's it. I haven't tried to record from line in, but it should work too, after converted to mono. However, something with more channels are showstopper. Again, also see suggestion about playback/recording error dialogs above. Further issues: 5. Multichannel import and recording - when doing import of mp3, I thought, what a heck, it does convert it to mono. Sometimes it is enough, but sometimes it would rock to have stereo file converted to two "Audio File" instruments. Probably some pop-up dialog/warning would be enough. Stereo recording would be more difficult and would require the same deinterleave element as multichannel sound cards. It is possible to have many channels in Ogg Vorbis, for example. 6. Accelerated graphics - as far as I understand, we use Cairo, but it has to be explicitly set to use hardware acceleration backend. How we can deal with this? Waveforms in fact are OK even now, but VU meters sure is lagging like a hell. :) As I wanted to post this as soon as possible, I will send another mail with more detailed bug information, like report numbers. Cheers, Peteris Krisjanis. _______________________________________________ jokosher-devel-list mailing list jokosher-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/jokosher-devel-list
