XMMS Second Generation - Comments.

[Tobias Rundström]

Hello cross-desktop-guys.

I am projectmanager / developer on the second generation of XMMS
(xmms2), many of you have seen me and the other developers on
#freedesktop since we have choosen to use DBUS as IPC for XMMS2.

I am sending this E-Mail to the xdg-list because we would like to have
feedback from you on the new player in order to make "everyone" happy
with it. 

First a little background on XMMS2.

The project was started by the original author of XMMS (Peter Alm) and
me. Peter saw the need to rewrite the codebase since it is more then 5
years old and is not very well maintained. The new design was made 6
months ago and we have now coded something more or less useful.
Unfortunaly Peter has left team, leaving me and Anders Gustafsson the
developers on this project. 

Some highlights of the new design:

We have three layers: a transport layer, a decoder layer and a output
layer (the old design just had input and output). On top of this we have
effects and visualizations.

It is a client-server based model where the server takes care of all the
decoding and the client is just an empty shell listening to DBUS
signals.

This is where we are today, we are now working to produce the GUI, for
this we have specified an skinable widget that should "live" ontop of
either GTK or QT. This widget is defined by a XML script and can be
hooked to C functions (like stop, play, skip). This model is inspired by
XUL but tries to be less bloated.

This is where we need your comments. We would like to know what you
think would be good ideas for XMMS2 both Graphic and Design wise. We
also need feedback on what you think is missing in current musicplayers.

Please take a minute to think about it.

Oh and just some clearifications:
1 XMMS2 is a MUSIC player, we are not trying to compeat with xine or
mplayer.
2 XMMS2 will not use gstreamer or gnome-vfs framework. There is many
reasons on why, one of them are that we are as stated in 1 a music
player.
3 XMMS2 is not backed by 4Front anymore, this is mine, Peter and Anders
project.
4 Since there is no GUI for XMMS2 yet this project is better kept
dark, so please don't post this to slashdot or whatever. We will
release when we have something useable.

Thansk for your time.

Tobias Rundström.
Ps. andersca: när får vi DBUS till WIN32? :-) Ds.