[gst-devel] GStreamer Monkey's Audio plugin 0.6

[Christian Schaller]

This is the first release of the standalone package containing the
GStreamer plugin for the Monkey's Audio format (monkeysaudio.com).

We decided to not include this plugin in our core release since the
basic Monkey's Audio library that is included with the plugin has a
rather restrictive license which demands you get permission from
original author before doing anything with it except use it in
the form recieved.

Distributions wishing to include this plugin with the GStreamer
packages might do so under the permission we have recieved, but be
aware that it is a 'free beer' licensed plugin and do not satisfy
either the FSF, Debian or OSI standards for free software.

Monkey's Audio is a lossless audio format similar to FLAC (FLAC is also
supported by GStreamer and available under the free LGPL license.) In
our experience monkey's audio compresses the files a bit more than FLAC
does, but do demand a bit more CPU than FLAC to decode, so it is a
tradeoff.

This plugin should work both with the 0.6.x stable release series and
the upcoming 0.7.x development series of GStreamer. The plugin
installs both a decoder and an encoder, so you can use it to
playback your .ape files with GStreamer based applications like
Gst-player and Totem, to convert your .ape files to other formats
like FLAC, Ogg, Wav and Mp3 and to convert your other media files to
.ape files.

As a sidenote we do hope this plugin package will be usefull as an
example and source for buildscripts etc. for developers who wish to
distribute GStreamer plugins either standalone or with their libraries
and/or applications. For people doing libraries that are yet not API
stable this might be a better solution that including the plugin
in the core GStreamer packages as it will avoid dependency problems when
people upgrade to new versions of your library. 

Credits:
The Monkey's Audio plugin was made
by Jeremy Simon
The Monkey's Audio library was made
by Matt Ashland


Andres Salomon contributed the patches needed to Make the plugin
work on big-endian systems like PPC (Currently only works with GStreamer
0.7.x). 
Christian F.K. Schaller did the packaging and build scripts of this
standalone plugin.

Download instructions can be found at the bottom of this page:
http://www.gstreamer.net/releases/gst-monkeysaudio/0.6.0/