Archive for the ‘News’ Category

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Your Comments Wanted! – Considering Donation Options

Published by ilikenwf on March 31, 2013 in News and Uncategorized. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

So far, we’ve tried to avoid ever discussing the “d” word, donations! We’ve felt that as a good project, we wanted to try to avoid having to deal with money, but it’s getting to the point where it seems inevitable. The factors involved revolve around our need for hardware, costs associated with appearing at open source conferences, and most importantly, our lack of devs – we really need a bug bounty program to get some things fixed, or if we have enough, the money to hire outside developers to help us get Nightingale to be all it can be.

Some of the ideas on the table include accepting PayPal, bitcoins, litecoins and whatever other digital currencies, and perhaps setting up an indiegogo page – which of these do you like best? Do you have any other/better ideas? If you happen to have disposable income, and would like to pledge an amount to hire a developer or setup a bug bounty, we’re of course interested in hearing from you as well.

Please, tell us what you think here in the comments, in our IRC channel, #nightingale on mozdev, or on the forums.

Happy Nightlies! (Updated 2/13)

Published by Antoine Turmel on January 15, 2013 in News. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .
 “Nightlies” are builds compiled every night, more information on Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightly_build
Since the beginning, there were Songbird nightlies available to test out new features and develop add-ons for future versions. There were both branch and trunk builds released each day – later they decided to only provide trunk builds. As of now they seem to build branch builds again for version 2.1.0.
Nightingale’s case is particular, we didn’t have build servers like POTI does when starting the project. Fortunately, we are now setting up buildbots to compile and upload nightly builds every day, if there are changes in the source code.
To begin with, three build servers are provided by Antoine (GeekShadow):
  • GNU/Linux, Ubuntu 12.04.1 i686 → .tar.bz2
  • GNU/Linux, Ubuntu 12.04.1 x86_64 → .tar.bz2
  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x86 → .exe (Inno Installer) and .zip

One is provided by Matt (ilikenwf):

  • Mac OS X 10.5.8 and greater → .dmg
All servers are located in France, except for the Mac, and are set to upload builds to SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ngale/files/trunk-Nightlies/

For now we are only building the sb-trunk-oldxul branch which is version 1.12 but matches Songbird trunk (2.2). We chose to rename to version  to “1.12″ mostly because there are no major changes between the Songbird trunk (2.2) and 1.11 since POTI is mostly bumping up the version numbers for their closed-source work.

Some technical notes :
Unlike Mozilla and POTI, we have decided not to use Buildbot since it’s much too complex for our needs. Instead, we are using our own bash scripts available on GitHub. They are easy to use and modify :)
More information can be found on our wiki :
Whether you’re a developer wanting to build the next generation of add-ons or a user not afraid of the freshest and sometimes very unstable changes,  Grab a Nightly Build and let us know what you think!

Merry Christmas from (and to) The Nightingale Team!

Published by ilikenwf on December 27, 2012 in Core and News. 11 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

New (old) Hardware

I recently purchased an old 2006-era Mac Mini for our development, so that I could make sure and get a more proper Mac build out for our next release. I’m happy to say that after setting up the build environment (and reinstalling OSX once the machine arrived, as I trust no eBay seller to do that part for me), I have most of the Nightingale build dependencies built fresh.

2006 Era Mac MiniNew Mac Testing Build

I’m still fighting with XULRunner to get it to build under OS X. That said, I did compile the new TagLib, so I was able to cobble together a current trunk build for all 5 of our Mac users out there (j/k, we have at least 7 Mac users :P ). You can download the testing build here. I’d love to hear of any issues you run into, as I’m using a different compiler – the vanilla gcc 4.7 – to build the dependencies and client this time around. It should provide for smaller, faster, more efficient code.

Gearing Up For A New Release: 1.12

In other news, the team and I are all working hard to get the polish all together for a 1.12 release here at the beginning of January. Short of fighting to get the FLAC albumart display working, we have a lot of great changes, as well as more stability across all our platforms. On Linux especially, we have more system integration, and only have to rely on XULRunner and SQLite as precompiled dependencies. The release after next should do away with those altogether.

New Year’s Parties – Use Nightingale, Tell Friends!

We hope you had a Merry Christmas, and happy holidays all around. Furthermore, we all wish you a very happy New Year! Make sure to use Nightingale to play the music at your New Year’s parties, and show it off to your friends! Our resolution is to make Nightingale the best desktop music player out there, and to have more people use it as well. We can’t do that without your help, so please, make sure to help us get the word out!

Discuss!

Feel free to talk about the player, discuss the Mac build, or even just let us know your New Year’s resolutions in the comments, jump into the forums, or chat with us in #nightingale on irc.mozilla.org.

Nightingale: Now Supporting System/Vanilla TagLib!

Published by ilikenwf on November 13, 2012 in News. 7 Comments Tags: , , , .

Thanks to some really hard work by our own rsjtdrjgfuzkfg, Nightingale now supports the current/vanilla version of TagLib! For all of our users, this means better ID3 tag support, and a lot fewer problems and bugs with tags and importing your music in general. For our Linux users, this means that Nightingale will automatically build against your distro’s TagLib package. If you maintain Nightingale packages, please update them to require TagLib>=1.8 before your next build of sb-trunk-oldxul.

We plan on releasing official builds (a new version) as soon as we get the build process working 100% on Windows and Mac with our new dependencies. Once the transition is complete, you can be sure the next version of Nightingale will be coming your way!

Other Upgrades and News

In other news, the only two dependencies left to convert to use those provided by the host distribution on Linux are SQLite and XULRunner. Both are in progress, and we welcome any help and support you can provide in speeding up the process. This work not only benefits Linux users, but will also provide Windows and Mac users with much more stable, efficient, and fast versions of the dependencies, all making for a better Nightingale.

Stability on Windows – and an upcoming Release

Published by rsjtdrjgfuzkfg on October 12, 2012 in Core and News. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

A lot of interesting work has been done behind the scenes since the last blog post. Even though we’re still low on developers (are you a dev? we’re still searching!), ilikenwf and Mook made many steps in the direction of building with a more current, vanilla XULrunner. Non-technically speaking, that means making Nightingale much faster and more reliable, with more addons and support for newer web services. I (rjtdrjgfuzkfg) just finished working on the fix for the only blocker issue we had with 1.11.

We finally have working Windows builds using a recent version of taglib (read: builds without the annoying crash issue) and that means that the basic porting for using a newer, vanilla taglib is done. Now we need your support – please download the testing build and try it out to see if everything works as expected. A huge part of the metadata handling code was rewritten, so we need to test it thoroughly. Please report any issues and all the successes you run into in the forums or at the github issue tracker, so we can fix them in preparation for releasing the next version!

We will also be working on using system taglib support on Linux, which would reduce the number of bundled dependencies, making Nightingale even more lightweight. Linux builds of the current taglib changes are not yet available due to the required dependency rebuild, but they should be rolling out very soon!

Speaking of 1.11.1, we’re moving in the direction of releasing the second and probably last release from the current code branch. There are many bugs fixed already, and we’re looking forward to publishing them in a stable build soon. Again, we need your help testing, so make sure and let us know if you see something that is not ready yet or broken.

 

Thanks for your interest into the Project!

- rsjtdrjgfuzkfg and the Nightingale Community