Archive for the ‘Desktop’ Category

MusicBrainz Picard

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

MusicBrainz along with the Picard tagger is without a doubt the best way to organize and manage large collections of music. The tagger will fingerprint audio files and automatically correct their metadata and filenames.

I’ve been using MusicBrainz since 2005, and even attempted to write my own tagger for it in Java back when Picard didn’t exist. When I switched to OpenSolaris, it was one of the programs I missed the most. So I went about building a package for it.

Unfortunately, the software has a lot of complicated dependencies such as Qt and FFmpeg which aren’t included in OpenSolaris either. FFmpeg I can understand; it infringes on countless software patents <insert rant here>. But Qt? There’s no reason for that. It is easily the second most popular graphics toolkit for Unix. Sure, the Solaris KDE guys have a build of it, but it installs to a non-standard prefix and doesn’t include 64-bit libs. No thank you.

Anyway, the package and its dependencies are up on my package repository for b132 and later. You know the deal…pfexec pkg install picard. Spec files are, as always, available from my svn repository.

Now that I have a good start on the FFmpeg package, I’m going to keep working on it, adding support for more codecs and eventually build MPlayer so I can stop using this guy’s less-than-ideal build.

EDIT: Just FYI, in order to get nice antialiased fonts in Qt applications, I had to modify the fontconfig settings. This is not necessary for GTK+ applications because they get their settings from the gnome-appearance-properties dialog. So in ~/.fonts.conf add:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<!--  Use the Antialiasing -->
  <match target="font">
    <edit name="antialias" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

Other Qt appearance settings can be changed from the qtconfig dialog.

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Posted in Desktop | No Comments »

Music Player Daemon on OpenSolaris

Friday, December 4th, 2009

MPD is essential software for me. It’s one of the few music players out there for Unix that does gapless playback and ReplayGain. It’s also nice that, because it’s a daemon, I’m not bound to any particular interface. Fortunately, there is a really good one in the form of Sonata.

MPD is not included in OpenSolaris yet, so last weekend I built some packages for it. The build has been stable for me and I’m happy with the state of the packages so I thought I’d share them. First add my package repository:

$ pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.thestaticvoid.com:10000/ thestaticvoid

MPD

This package and its dependencies require OpenSolaris 2009.06 or newer. Install it by typing pfexec pkg install mpd. The following formats are supported:

$ mpd -V
...
Supported decoders:
[mad] mp3 mp2
[vorbis] ogg oga
[oggflac] ogg oga
[flac] flac
[audiofile] wav au aiff aif
[faad] aac
[mp4] m4a mp4
[mpcdec] mpc
[wavpack] wv

Supported outputs:
shout null fifo ao solaris httpd 

Supported protocols:
file:// http://

I plan on adding ffmpeg support soon which will add support for even more codecs.

To run MPD, create a configuration file in your home directory like

port                    "6600"
music_directory         "~/music"
playlist_directory      "~/.mpd/playlists"
db_file                 "~/.mpd/mpd.db"
log_file                "~/.mpd/mpd.log"

Create any directories from the configuration file that don’t exist, such as ~/.mpd/playlists and start the daemon by running mpd ~/.mpdconf as your user. It will immediately build a library of your music.

Alternatively, mpd can be run system-wide, which just seems more appropriate to me for whatever reason. The only complicated part about this is that you have to give MPD permission to write to the audio device. Edit /etc/logindevperms, find the /dev/sound/* lines and change the mode to 0666 so that they look like:

/dev/console    0666    /dev/sound/*        # audio devices
/dev/vt/active  0666    /dev/sound/*        # audio devices

Logout and log back in for the settings to take effect. Then modify /etc/mpd.conf to your liking and start the daemon by typing svcadm enable mpd. You may have to svcadm refresh manifest-import for SMF to load the mpd manifest.

mpdscribble

I also built a package for mpdscribble which is a mature, well-maintained scrobbler for Last.fm. Install it by typing pfexec pkg install mpdscribble. Set your Last.fm or Libre.fm username and password in /etc/mpdscribble.conf and start the daemon with svcadm enable mpdscribble. That’s all there is to it.

Sonata

Sonata is a lightweight cilent for MPD. Looks pretty nice too:

Sonata

Because Sonata requires Python 2.5, and OpenSolaris 2009.06 only really supports Python 2.3, this package requires build 127 or newer. Install it by typing pfexec pkg install sonata. It can be launched from the Applications->Sound & Video menu.

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Posted in Desktop | 1 Comment »

Mixer State in OpenSolaris

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

I’ve recently installed OpenSolaris on my desktop and noticed that my volume settings do not persist between reboots. A quick search revealed that that functionality hasn’t been implemented yet. The thread suggested using the mixerctl command to save and restore the mixer state so I’ve thrown together an SMF service to do it automatically on boot and shutdown.

First, the script which should go into /lib/svc/method/sound-mixer:

#!/sbin/sh

. /lib/svc/share/smf_include.sh
smf_is_globalzone || exit $SMF_EXIT_OK

ctl_file=$(svcprop -p options/ctl_file $SMF_FMRI)

case "$1" in
'start')
        if [ ! -f $ctl_file ]; then
                echo "Mixer control file $ctl_file does not exist."
                exit $SMF_EXIT_OK
        fi

        if ! /usr/sbin/mixerctl -r $ctl_file; then
                echo "Error restoring mixer state."
                exit $SMF_EXIT_OK
        fi
        ;;

'stop')
        if ! /usr/sbin/mixerctl -f -s $ctl_file; then
                echo "Error saving mixer state."
                exit $SMF_EXIT_OK
        fi
        ;;

*)
        echo "Usage: $0 { start | stop }"
        exit $SMF_EXIT_ERR_CONFIG
        ;;
esac

exit $SMF_EXIT_OK

Second, the manifest which can be saved anywhere and loaded with svccfg -v import <manifest>:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE service_bundle SYSTEM "/usr/share/lib/xml/dtd/service_bundle.dtd.1">

<service_bundle type='manifest' name='mixer'>

<service
       name='system/sound/mixer'
       type='service'
       version='1'>

        <create_default_instance enabled='true' />
        <single_instance />

        <dependency
           name='fs-local'
           grouping='require_all'
           restart_on='none'
           type='service'>
                <service_fmri value='svc:/system/filesystem/local' />
        </dependency>
       
        <dependency
           name='device-audio'
           grouping='require_all'
           restart_on='none'
           type='service'>
                <service_fmri value='svc:/system/device/audio' />
        </dependency>

        <exec_method
               type='method'
               name='start'
               exec='/lib/svc/method/sound-mixer start'
               timeout_seconds='60' />

        <exec_method
               type='method'
               name='stop'
               exec='/lib/svc/method/sound-mixer stop'
               timeout_seconds='60' />

        <property_group name='options' type='application'>
                <propval name='ctl_file' type='astring' value='/etc/sound/mixer.state' />
        </property_group>

        <property_group name='startd' type='framework'>
                <propval name='duration' type='astring' value='transient' />
        </property_group>

        <stability value='Unstable' />

        <template>
                <common_name>
                        <loctext xml:lang='C'>Mixer State Saver</loctext>
                </common_name>
                <documentation>
                        <manpage title='mixerctl' section='1M'
                           manpath='/usr/share/man' />
                </documentation>
        </template>

</service>

</service_bundle>

UPDATE: In b130, the audioctl command replaces mixerctl. In the sound-mixer script above, change /usr/sbin/mixerctl -r $ctl_file to /usr/bin/audioctl load-controls $ctl_file and /usr/sbin/mixerctl -f -s $ctl_file to /usr/bin/audioctl save-controls -f $ctl_file.

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Posted in Desktop | 1 Comment »