Archive for the 'Hacks' Category

I’ve got a few mails lately enquiring about the lack of visible activity on forked-daapd in recent times. Well, for one, I’ve been busy with other things, but there’s also been some non-public activity.

So, here’s what should happen in the next few months, in no particular order:

• overhaul of the database schema and code;
• metadata handling will (finally, probably) move away from ffmpeg;
• release of the libdispatch-based forked-daapd code.

The database overhaul will bring a much-needed speedup on small devices and big libraries. It’s being worked on, but it ground to a halt with new year and all. Hopefully it’ll resume soon.

I’m also giving up on ffmpeg for metadata extraction. It doesn’t work well at all (as everybody knows by now) and it’s actually getting worse and worse. With the ffmpeg takeover/fork (call it whatever you want) it’s unclear what’s going to happen on this front. So I’m giving up and the metadata scanner will probably switch to using TagLib (one more dependency, yay).

Last, but definitely not least, the libdispatch codebase should finally see the light at the end of the tunnel in the coming months. I’ve been working on this since July last year, moving away from libevent. If you never heard about libdispatch, or Grand Central Dispatch, read my previous post on the subject. I’ll talk about it in more details at a later date.

Finally, as far as Squeeze is concerned, I plan to provide forked-daapd backports as long as it’ll be practical to do so.

This is it for now. I don’t have a “one more thing” in my sleeve, sorry. Time is at a premium right now, so big things have to wait.

Hey, look, a release! I’ve decided to start making tarball releases that make it easier to build forked-daapd, especially on embedded platforms.

The tarballs come with the build system already generated (as should any real release) and they also contain pre-generated source files for the ANTLR3-based parsers used in forked-daapd. The pre-generated files will be used if antlr3 is not available for the build.

I expect that pretty much everybody will end up using the generated files, given the feedback I’ve had about ANTLR3. I hope this will also clear the misconception that forked-daapd depends on Java.

I have expanded the installation instructions, making the distinction between building from the git tree and building from the tarballs.

A few more fixes made it to this version since my last post, and Kai also put the final piece to the sort headers by adding sort headers to the song listings.

Tarballs are available at http://alioth.debian.org/~jblache/forked-daapd/. Tarball integrity can be verified with GPG using the matching GPG signature file and my F5D65169 GPG key from the Debian keyring.

I’ve been working on this for a few months now; it’s taken quite some time because I wanted to do it right and deliver something better than what already existed in the OpenSource world as far as that particular technology was (not) concerned. So here it is:

AirTunes v2 UDP streaming

forked-daapd can now do streaming to multiple AirTunes devices (as well as the local soundcard) and can be controlled from Remote (and, ideally, from anything that speaks DACP).

I’m releasing this early while the paint is still wet and not everything works on the DACP-side of things. Case in point, while playing a song or an album is supported, playing a playlist isn’t. There’s some work needed on this particular feature, and it’ll get there eventually.

There have been a couple of other changes in the codebase in recent weeks too; details after the jump.

Implementing AirTunes v2 has been quite fun and, in addition to releasing the forked-daapd code today, I’ve also taken the time to write down my findings about the protocol so others can experiment with it. This documentation is by no means exhaustive nor complete as far as the protocol goes; if you find out anything I haven’t, let me know so I can update this document.

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