madman

Package frenzy. Within minutes of each other, both Christian Hammers and Jaako H Kyro made packages available for their respective distributions. So now, if you have Fedora Core 1 or Debian, it's never been easier to get madman. Thanks to the packagers!

Greetings from the night shift. Guess what. CVS HEAD madman is now based on Scott Wheeler's TagLib. I've decided to delay many other features planned for 0.94 and release as soon as possible. Hang in there...

libid3tag. If only anybody had told me this: I was just investigating why some ID3 tags just aren't written for some MP3s. I stumbled upon this piece of code, hidden deeply in the guts of libid3tag:

  /* hard general case: rewrite entire file */

  /* ... */
done:
  return 0;

To those not fluent in C++, this means that libid3tag's implementer chose to just forego the hard case and leave that as an exercise to the interested reader. Grrr. :barf: So, I guess it's going to be TagLib by Scott Wheeler.

More Slackware. SlackCare has also made Slackware packages, which they claim are more correct than Adam's. Find the link to their packages on the download page.

Email trouble. Some people have complained that they were unable to get anything posted to the mailing list or sent personally to me. I'll look into this, I'll let you know right here if I find out what's causing this.

Bugs in 0.93. As was to be expected, there were a couple of bugs in 0.93. Here's the list so far:

• The build system litters system directories with .sconsign files if you let it.
• The main build script was lacking a comma.

So, nothing horribly broken. And plus, there are bugs in every release. That's why there's always the next one. :) [Apologies to Isaac Richards]

Adam Ward made Slackware packages for madman. Get them from the download area.

It has finally happened! The madman source has finally reached a state that I deem worthy of being called 0.93. Go grab it while it's hot! The most massive changes since the last stable release (which was *gasp* 0.91.1) include the addition of a very capable AutoDJ (Thanks, Shawn!) and a builtin web server, minimization to the system tray, a new build system as well as over 100 other fixes and improvements. I hope to have downloadable binary packages for a few distributions soon.

Is madman randomly crashing on you? The good news: It's not madman's fault. :) The bad news: XMMS 1.2.9 has a bug that causes programs controlling it to abort every once in a while. So, before complaining, please upgrade to XMMS 1.2.10, which is available from the usual place. In other news, 0.93rc1 got quite a bunch of testing, Tim Dreessen deserves a big thank you for all the bugs he found and reported. 0.93rc2 is now officially available through the file release system.

Madman 0.93 release candidate 1 has finally happened, while my thesis is keeping me busy... It's a pretty massive update, with lots of potential breakage. Please give it a round of testing. Depending on the amount of actual problems, 0.93 will be out very soon. You can grab this version from CVS as tag MADMAN_RELEASE_0_93RC1 or from the download page. Major new features in this round: Rewritten AutoDJ (Shawn Willden's work), Fixes for many string encoding bugs, an AutoTagger, passive popups and a new build system.

madman now has an actual mailing list, with people on it and everything. Wow. Little did I know. ;) Also, madman has an IRC channel to hang out on, that is #madman on irc.freenode.net. I can be found lingering there every once in a while, everybody else is invited to join. The next release, is, as always, late. Shawn and I are discussing some fairly major changes to madman's core, but I still hope to release some a working drop of the current code as 0.93beta1. Hold tight, it'll get done.I promise. ;)

0.93 is still well underway. Shawn Willden agreed to rewrite the AutoDJ, and Christian Plagemann made a new logo for madman, which will be the official one from the next release. :) As for myself, I'm down to three simple items on the TODO list before 0.93 goes beta.