Monthly Archive for April, 2011

forked-daapd: v0.16

Published on April 30, 2011 in forked-daapd and Hacks. Closed

forked-daapd v0.16 is a bugfix release, mainly addressing a bad regression introduced in v0.15.

Fixes:

  • DAAP songlist off-by-one with sort tags
  • handling of non-UTF-8 tags under some circumstances
  • file size in HTTP streaming

The DAAP bug is what causes an incorrect display and sorting in iTunes, the tags issue could cause a segfault in some cases, and finally fixing the file size in the HTTP streaming code may or may not fix some issues but was a bad bug anyway.

Tarballs available at http://alioth.debian.org/~jblache/forked-daapd/ ; GPG signatures made with my Debian key F5D65169.

forked-daapd: v0.15

Published on April 9, 2011 in forked-daapd and Hacks. Closed

forked-daapd v0.15 is here! The database speedups did not make it into this release as they still need some more work.

Now let’s talk about what did make it into this release: AppleTV metadata support. When streaming to an AppleTV, you’ll now get the cover art, artist, album, title and playback position displayed on your TV.

This was made possible by a forked-daapd user who offered me one of the new AppleTVs, so thanks much to him!

Although we haven’t got the database speedups this time around, we’ve got some other speedups:

  • the code generating the song list was slightly reworked;
  • hash tables of static data were replaced with static hash tables generated by gperf;
  • the artwork code can now send out both PNG and JPEG to clients.

The first two items bring in a new build-dependency: gperf. I promise it’s not some Java-based monstrosity ;) It’s small and C++, so no issue getting that running on whatever your platform is. Pre-generated files are not provided for this.

The last item means if your cover art is mostly JPEG, forked-daapd won’t be spending time turning it into PNG before sending it out to the client. That’s some CPU time that can be put to better use.

Next release: when it’s ready!

For Squeeze users, I am providing backports on backports.debian.org; due to the update policy, they are lagging behind the releases.

Tarballs available at http://alioth.debian.org/~jblache/forked-daapd/ ; GPG signatures made with my Debian key F5D65169.

450 Telcos suck

Published on April 1, 2011 in Rants. Closed

Due to cockups and/or willful sabotage by the telcos my ISP relies on for its DSL services, I am unreachable by email starting early this morning (UTC) and until further notice. My primary MX is off the net, mail is spooling on my backup MX so nothing should be lost.

<expletive deleted>

Update 2011-04-05: stupid telco finally rebuilt the line properly. I’m back, no mail lost at first glance and I’m slowly digging into that pile of mail. If you don’t receive a reply by tomorrow, please resend.