madman

So after madman is currently orphaned in Debian and might get kicked out of the archive along with xmms kicking the bucket, I just noticed that one of my newer pieces of code made it into Debian: tagpy! :) That's awesome.

To everybody who is holding their breath waiting for a madman update: I still use madman for my own music managing needs, as it still (surprise) is exactly what I want in a music manager. But I simply don't have enough time for serious maintenance. I might switch it to audacious in the near future to keep it working for me, but I'm not promising extensive new features...

Daniel Roethlisberger wrote in to note that madman is now in the FreeBSD ports collection, which should make it a lot easier for you BSD'ers out there to try madman. A corresponding note has also been added to the download page.

Thanks to Scott Wheeler's tireless work on Taglib, madman (the development version in Arch, really) now has support for Musepack (or "MPC") files. This was half-way to being added once before, but support in Taglib makes this a no-brainer. Seems like tag writing in Taglib is still not 100%, but I assume it'll get there. I hope you're happy. :)

To celebrate this, I also fixed Arch downloads. If you got complaints about 2004 last time you tried to get something from Arch, try again.

Ben Montgomery made some Debian packages of a recent development version of madman. Try them out, and bother Ben or the list if you have trouble. Yes, I do agree that this is a strong sign that I should release 0.94 ASAP. It's coming, don't worry. ;)

Update: Ben just told me that he doesn't have time to keep up with development any more, so he's retired his packages. Any volunteers to take his place?

Apparently, Trolltech made some incompatible change to QTable's code, and by "virtue" of this change, in-line retagging doesn't work for me any more. I'll endeavor to have this fixed soon, but I'll be out to the US for about a week and a half at the end of March, so I suppose it'll be a while. Hang in there...

Update: The problem appears to have vanished. So, I assume it was a temporarily broken Debian package. Or a fluke in the transjector matrix. Or whatever. :)

I just committed a first cut of the much-requested "AutoDJ from Source" functionality. I'd appreciate feedback on how well it does for everybody. 0.94 is well on the way, but as you may have seen from my journal, my life has sped up rather than slowed down since I finished. However, I'm fighting to actually spend some time on madman maintenance. Wish me luck. :)

madman's home page now semi-automatically draws its news from the madman category of my journal. I hope that this will encourage me to update madman's news more frequently by making the process more convenient than writing PHP source code. (ugh) As an added benefit, you may comment on the news by clicking on the title links. Why not try that out right now? :P You may even syndicate the madman feed on your home page.

In other news, I've finished my degree and will hopefully have more time for madman for some time to come. Especially, the 0.94 release has been burning under my fingernails for quite some time. But there are still quite a number of bugs to catch. As always, it'll be released when it's done... :)

Trackers are closed now. The Sourceforge bug, feature and support trackers are closed now, effective immediately. Please turn to the mailing list for your support needs. Anonymous posting is allowed, but please request for yourself to be cc'ed. If you have data in the trackers, it has not been deleted and will influence future madman releases. I'm sorry that I had to take this step, but I unfortunately do not have the time to properly maintain them. Thanks for your understanding.

Giving CVS the boot. Work on 0.94 is continuing nicely, with Guido as a notable addition to the development team. Shawn is considering a rewrite of the criteria language. And you'll probably miss all this new development if you only check the SourceForge CVS--it is out of use as of today. The code is now maintained in my public arch repository. See the download page for details on how to get the tree.