[Canola] Canola is free!
 

[This text has been posted to http://etrunko.blogspot.com/2009/03/canola-is-free.html]

I'm pleased to announce that I've just closed bug #3881, which means that from now on Canola and all its components are licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.

The source code of the former closed-source packages, Atabake, Download Manager, Terra and Canola, has been uploaded to our gitorious server a few hours ago.

The canola-devel mailing list for developers is already set up and working on garage. Everyone is very welcome to join us in the development of the project. For documentation, such as installation instructions, build dependency, and so on, I'm setting up a wiki that should go online by the end of this week under the openbossa.org domain.

With all this, Canola officially leaves the beta status. The packages of for the final 2.0.0 version will be uploaded soon, together with brand new Maemo-EFL.

Last, I'd like to thank everyone for supporting the project even before the very first release and especially for providing feedback on the various releases we had since December 2007. If today we were able to release Canola as Free Software, consider yourself responsible for it as well.

Best Regards, Etrunko.

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

Congratulations !

From the discussions I had with Marcelo in Berlin I gather it was far, far from trivial to obtain this result. Kudos to the entire team for being patient and persistent... and for a great product of course :-)

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

Thank you for your effort!! :)

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

This is great news. Congrats :)

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

Yes thanks to all for the effort in moving this from beta to release. I must also comment on the interface as this is one of the most pleasant things about the software.

I assume that the new version supports many more codecs?

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

The Canola project has been a phenomenal effort and I for one am very, very grateful.

I am sure the Canola team is immensely proud of its achievement, and rightly so.

Thanks to everyone concerned.

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

Thanks Canola team! Now I hope the community steps up and starts improving it even more.

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

Yep, just noticed this yesterday while cruising around at Maemo.org. Didn't realize it wasn't free before, but I'm glad to see it's become so now. :)

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

Thank all the team for the project.
Since canola does not have anymore a subforum I think should be better pratice keep all the posts in just one thread: I feel pointless have hundred of different thread with few posts each :)
just my 2eurocents

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

Congrats to the Canola Team! I was excited about Canola before I even got my NIT, and seeing it released Free to the world is awesome. You folks have done an amazing job so far, and I hope to see it get even better in the future. :D

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

I have also appreciated this app. Thanks so much.

BTW how does one place a feature request (or find out if it's already there)?
(I would like to adjust/remove the long gap between tracks)

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

Well, that would be song pre-buffering, and as far as I know, most good players these days have that as a standard feature. It's also dead easy to implement without much of a memory footprint. It just requires that 10-15 seconds of the song be queued in memory prior to the end of the previous track. Usually the trigger point for queuing the next track is when the song has 10 seconds or less of playtime left. Code wise that's dead easy to implement.

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

Unfortunately the DSP prevents implementing this easily.

Anyway, bugs and enhancement requests should be filed in Bugzilla.

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

now that it is free, what are the next steps? Is there a roadmap of who is working on certain features or fixes?

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

Hmm, this is probably some obscure meaning of 'dead easy' ;-)

Even without DSP I wouldn't call gapless playback (or crossfading which is similar problem) to be dead easy.

On tablets this is further complicated by DSP doing both mp3 decoding and playback inside one black box. So you can't decode next song in advance without playing it and also most probably the mp3 dsp task does not allow concurrent usage anyway so you can't use it at all while first song still plays.

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

When non-programmers say that something is "dead easy" to implement, then it means that it's possible to implement. When they say "easy", then it's impossible, and when they say "hard", then you'll do it in 10 seconds with three lines of code. ;)

Anyway, what happened to the plans of INdT to port libxine to maemo to allow crossfading by decoding with the CPU?

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

lol. Fanosh, you're thinking in a file by file mentality. DSP's don't see the data they handle as files. They see it as streams of information that needs to be processed. It's up to the program to provide that stream of information. Thus to start playing it opens a file, reads the data into memory, then feeds that data to the DSP as a stream. Therefore to make gapless playing, all the program needs to do is append to the first stream and the rest is child's play. The DSP won't notice the difference. It'll just blindly process whatever is handed to it.

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

well, yes, you are mostly right. In case both songs are in mp3 format and you are parsing mp3 file yourself and your code is talking directly to mp3 decoding dsp task you could do some shortcuts like this. The other half of the problem is that nobody talks directly to dsp like this (except mplayer, ask Serge how dead easy it was). DSP is wrapped in gstreamer framework so for each file gstreamer pipeline with several elements is constructed and then started. This takes some time on the beginning of each file. I'm not sure you can pre-create such pipeline for next song while first one is playing and somehow queue/join them so there is no gap. And also I'm not sure you can feed next song to existing pipeline since the pipeline is specific to that file and its properties (song name and other tags, position, length, codec, bitrate, ...).

Well many things are possible but I wouldn't call it dead easy or child's play. Maybe for mp3 songs one could make shoutcast stream out of them and feed local network connection to gstreamer :-) Not sure what to do when you have mixed playlist with mp3, ogg and aac songs then.

BTW, I admit I don't understand both gstreamer and dsp tasks enough to be on your 'dead easy' level so I may be wrong with lot of stuff described above.

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

Well, even if it doesn't do it natively, it's easy enough to create a tiny wrapper that can modify the behavior of gstreamer.

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

Recognising my ignorance of the above problems it seems like if a player could play a 25 min track w/o stopping then why not five 5 min tracks? it would just have to stitch them together before starting. It could even add user defined gaps of mp3 silence to make it completely flexible. Of course, different formats might be tricky. Am I missing something?

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

Nope, not really. The only time when it might have a bit of trouble handling the stream and properly knitting it together would be when two files are different compression and/or bitrates, or a different format. But files of the same bitrate could very easily be knitted together into one continuous stream. That's already done routinely on mp3 players, so I fail to see why the n810 couldn't also do it.

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

You may miss separate track names (and other ID3 tags) and also the convenience of skipping to next/previous/other track or to beginning of each track except first. Also stitching directly on disk means doubling the disk space and some (possibly significant) delay for doing this.

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

I LOVE Canola! Thanks for all your hard work! :D

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

How can you dare bringing a derailed thread back on topic again? :D
fanoush and Lord Raiden were trying so hard... ;)

Re: [Canola] Canola is free!
 

"How can you dare bring a derailed thread back on topic again?"

Actually my fault for derailing, others were kindly answering my question.
BTW I did submit it as a feature request.

So to continue...

Canola is great!!!