Marlin - News and Information

Tuesday 3rd August 2004

This is the stuff daydreams are made of

1:20 am | Made a new release. Just for a laugh. It needs CVS of gst-plugins to work. There's a surprise.

Thursday 22nd April 2004

You were sleeping, so I left a note

10:05 pm | Been making more dialogs be all cool with markers and stuff like that. Here's the Select-a-region dialog.

Wednesday 21st April 2004

Back once again wit' the renegade master

10:39 pm | Hmm, been a while, been totally unmotivated by stuff but I'm back now, and coding away like a madman. Been doing some more work on making the crossfader an actual dialog, Marlin now compiles and runs pretty much okay with GStreamer 0.8, and we've got lots and lots of translations now. There was a screenshot of Marlin in a french computer magazine, so that was cool. And I've also added the ability to insert silence at markers, making markers slightly more useful than before. Lots of bugs have been fixed too.

Have a look at pretty picture. Sorry I've been away so long, I'm better now.

Wednesday 21st January 2004

I'm not in love, so don't you forget it

1:44 am | Some pretty eye candy for everyone

Yes, its the "funky" XFade widget. Its scalable at the moment and simple but I'm drawing everything by hand and wondering if the canvas would give me a better base for it... I dunno... I need to sleep and think about it.

Tuesday 13th January 2004

What a great night that was

1:15 am | Wow, was that really the last time I wrote something here? Eeek. That was a great night too. A REALLY great night. A very happy night, but anyway, I actually have no idea what I've done with Marlin since then. I think December was taken up by fixing GStreamer stuff and ummm, writing essays, and journals and working. Then there was the Christmas holidays which were taken up by Sim City 3, Work, and THUG on the PS2, and umm now its January and I've got exams. Wow, an incredibly unproductive month and a half. I'm sorry.

Anyway...I've just fixed the bug in the opt scheduler that was causing Marlin to crash when it was loading a file. Seems that groups were being unreffed, but never reffed, so things went all funny when there was more than one element in a group.

I'm also working on a mega "sekrit" super duper crossfader widget, but its stalled because of exams. They're over next week, but I always seem to be doing other things...dunno why. Or what.

But man, that was a wonderful night

Saturday 29th November 2003

I want to see my hearts reflection in your eyes

2:02 am | No pretty screenshots, but a quick note to point out that I've just ported from the EggMenuMerge code to the GtkUIManager stuff. I'm sure there's a few bugs here and there, but they'll get worked out and everything seems to work. Just need to hook up the Toolbar editor again and it'll be fine.

Friday 28th November 2003

This is what we've waited for, this is it boys, this is war.

12:07 am | If anyone hasn't noticed, the CVS for Marlin has moved to gnome CVS, and now has a bugzilla product at bugzilla.gnome.org.

And for anyone wondering if it is worth it to check out the latest CVS, let me tell you, oh yes it is...wavs load with their metadata correctly, when you delete areas of the sample, markers are deleted and moved appropriatly...And this screenshot will show the greatest of all new features EVER.

Yes, loading a sample gives you an estimated time till completion. How kick ass is that?

Friday 14th November 2003

Cos the whole world loves it when you sing the blues

3:13 pm | Hmm, seemed to be a successful release. HELLO to anyone new.

To celebrate, here's a nice screenshot showing that I've now got markers from sample data loaded.

Yes, its that anooying tutorial sample from Soundforge. To make this work, you'll need Marlin and GStreamer from CVS HEAD. I've also updated the dependancies for Marlin to be gtk 2.3.0 and glib2.3.0. Sorry guys, its time to upgrade to bleeding edge. Yey!

Wednesday 12th November 2003

4 More Years, How Many Dead?

1:10 pm | A new release. Everyone likes a new release so they do.

Saturday 18th October 2003

R U Still In 2 It, Cos I'm Still Intimate

1:32 am |A new optional dependancy has been added: Musicbrainz 2.0.0. What does this do? Well, it means that when you rip a CD, it gets the track info for you and displays it in the rip dialog....wheeeee. And remember that when you ripped a whole CD it would add markers where the tracks end...it labels those markers with the track name. Kick ass for pretty pointless functionality. YEY!

Thats what it looks like. I've also removed the "Type", "Start" and "Finish" columns, cos I figured I'd no idea what use they were...If you want them back, give me a valid reason and I'll stick em back in. Oh cunning, a way for people to indicate that they read this rubbish.

Monday 13th October 2003

Your's sincerely, The Breakfast Club

7:57 pm |

Watched the Breakfast Club, and while I did that, I also made metadata loading happen. It uses the rather cool GStreamer media-info library and it Just Works(tm). Mostly(tm). Hopefully, when the new File Selector widget is finished in GTK2.4, it'll be able to make this all look better.

Saturday 11th October 2003

Wow, twice in one day

4:11 pm | Been playing around with the CDDA extractor (CD Ripper for you non technical types) and now when you rip a whole CD, not only does it actually rip the last track like its supposed to (it didn't until now, silly me), it will also add markers at starts of the tracks, and name them "Track 1", "Track 2" etc. Maybe when/if I hook it up to something like Musicbrainz it can use that instead. Here's a screenshot of it, which yes, I could have faked and added the track mark by myself, but I didn't. So there.

You, me, we'll work it out

1:47 pm | Spent a day or so tracking down strange frame dropping bugs in the redone int2float element. And while I was doing that, I spent some time fixing the small niggling things in Marlin. I made the cdda rippe^wextractor extract again, seems it had become bitrotten over the past few months. Also made the CD drive selector select the drive, which I don't think it had ever done correctly. I also did a few things I had meant to do for ages but kept forgetting, like making the history arrow on the open toolbar button actually have a menu of recent items, and making double click in a sample view select areas between markers. Triple click is now Select All if there are markers on the view.

So yeah, I've got to that point where Marlin feels nice to use again. Things just seem to work, so I guess it might be release time soon.

Wednesday 8th October 2003

Yey Arnie! At least Ken Lay gets out of paying his debts

8:03 pm | You can take this as futher notice. Loading of audio formats other than MP3 has been reinstated. Getting audio from movies and obscure formats is still not back, but it will be. Eventually

Thursday 2nd October 2003

A plan born out of evil intent or stupidity

11:53 pm | Back once again...Fixed the bug in GStreamer, but found another one. Hacked around it in Marlin until I/someone fixes it, but it means that until further notice Marlin will only load mp3 files.

But, to stop your wild hounds from being set on me, I have two new screenshots to show off. The first demonstrates the new Sample Properties window

And the second shows the wonderful thumbnail overview bar that has replaced the old "Timeline" widget

Other stuff has probably happened too, but I can't think what...I guess we're sticking quite well to our roadmap though.

Thursday 25th September 2003

Where you're headed usually depends on where you start

1:48 am | Every project these days has a road map...So do we!

Yey.

Man, I'm bored.

Sunday 21st September 2003

Long time, no see

6:12 pm | Hmm, just noticed I'd not updated this for a while. Marlin has been slow for the last little while, because there's a bug in GStreamer and the only person who knows how to fix it has been away on holiday for a month...COME BACK WTAY!

Still, things have slowly progressed. I've split the sample drawing code out from the sample-view code, which means that other widgets can draw samples easily, and I've used this code to make the Overview bar draw a thumbnail sketch of the sample. Except I've not had a chance to test it yet (see above). I've also added some stuff to the marker view to make editing of markers better, and I've fixed a few bugs around the place. And I've even written about 10 lines of documentation.

This was just a little note to let everyone who loves us know that we're not dead, and was brought to you by the number 6 and 13 and the letter F

Wednesday 30th July 2003

Monkey see, monkey do

11:04 pm | Back again. Had a nice time away, had a break, and got markers more advanced. Still can't do anything useful with them, but they can be added, moved, and the marker bar can be focused and a marker gets the focus. Also shown in this lovely new screenshot is the marker text appearing on the sample view.

Also set up some of the dialogs for A11y stuff, and have helper functions to make a11y easy to add.

Plans for the next release are as follows.

• Make markers useful - save dialog, and cdda extractor.
• Make the overview bar contain a thumbnail of the whole wave.
• More documentation.
• Make most of the dialogs a11y compliant.

Hoping for a release around the middle to end of September, but as always these plans can change...

Saturday 28th June 2003

Body count climbs higher and higher

2:38 pm | Here's a new image showing the newest feature of Marlin ... Markers.

You can't do anything with them at the moment, but they are displayed. Need to make them be movable and removable, and editable and get their names displayed. Also in the shot is the new ruler at the top, that shows the frame count. It needs to be made to display it in time and seconds and all the other ways.

As a completely side note, I'm off to Kosovo in 4 days for a fortnight, so no Marlin work will be done, except in my head. It might look like Marlin is dead or stalled, its not. Its just having a holiday.

Sunday 8th June 2003

Work progresses through the Mysts of Tyme

1:15 am | Been a popular week for Marlin, so hello to everyone who's turned up at the Marlin party. And we're not resting on our laurals, oh no... This past few days have seen Paste Replace hit CVS, along with the ability to limit Mix and Replace by having it react to a selection being present and if there is a selection, then the operation only happens to the selected part. Replace is basically the same as a Mix but with the destination mix level at -∞dB. Second large change is that a new Selection menu has appeared in the toolbar, with the selection related items from the edit menu being moved. Also added to that menu are Halve Selection, Double Selection, Shift Selection Left and Shift Selection Right.

Monday 2nd June 2003

Marlin 0.1 released

7:54 pm | The very first Marlin release is out! Woohoo. Listening to Set Fire To Flames as a celebration.

Wednesday 14th May 2003

Just a friendly update

1:58 am | Been working hard. Small things make the application. The little touches. So I've been doing them. Cos they're fun. Also added an adjust volume control, and started on "Insert silence". Help is now clickable in most dialogs, execpt 1, but that'll be fixed. Love and kisses iainxoxox

Wednesday 7th May 2003

Cut 'n' Paste Mofo!

1:31 am | The paste code has just been committed. That means Marlin can now Cut and Copy, Paste, Paste Mix and Paste New. I'm sure there's bugs to be ironed out, but Pasting is important. One more thing off my list of 0.1 features.

Saturday 3rd May 2003

Opt Fixes

1:46 am | Marlin now works with GStreamer's opt scheduler correctly. Had some issues with stereo files, but that is now fixed

Friday 2nd May 2003

A New Website

6:34 pm | Okay, so Marlin now has a new website. Woooo. I copied the design from Stopdesign.com because I have no artisitc talent at all. Or HTML/CSS skills. Hopefully it should be easy to use and understand.