Cynthiune 0.9.5 review
DownloadCynthiune is a free software and romantic music player for GNUstep and Mac OS X
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Cynthiune is a free software and romantic music player for GNUstep and Mac OS X. Cynthiune can play Ogg and MP3 files.
For the moment, it looks pretty much like XMMS, Winamp and similar software. Even though it has far less features than those, the essential components of a usable and user-friendly program are there in my opinion.
From a programmatic point-of-view, I have decided to write a program that is released only when considered bug-free. The free software community lacks, IMnsHO, a sense of quality that makes its programs nearly useless to lambda users. Not only is it useless, but I think it also gives free software a bad reputation. The principle of freedom in "free software" is fundamental to me, but it has to be reachable not only by some sort of geeky elite. There is no point in telling users that since they have the freedom to enhance those programs, they must fix them if they want to use them. Releasing a program with too many bugs is of no use and is likely not to interest other fellow programmers in the community either.
On the other hand, Apple has published an interesting program called "iTunes". Of course, it is not free software but it does implement interesting ideas that I would like to include in Cynthiune. For example: CD burning, complete playlist management, etc... Personally I find its user interface to be not as user-friendly as it could be. My plan is thus to take advantage of my own programming skills and sense of aesthetics (and ergonomy) to try to write something a little bit different, inspired both by XMMS/Winamp and iTunes. Cynthiune is thus currently very basic but its core design is starting to be extensible enough that it will not be too much trouble to enhance it.
Installation:
If all your library requirements are fulfilled (see below). Just type "make && make install". If you want to run Cynthiune from the source directory, you would have to type "make local-build=yes". This way, the linker will be forced against to link Cynthiune.app against the copy of the Cynthiune framework that was built under the source directory. Whenever you are missing a library or if a specific file-format does not interest you, you can disable the build of its bundle by typing "make disable-[bundle]=yes" (where [bundle] is the name of the bundle you wish to avoid). For the available values, have a look at the GNUmakefile of the top source directory.
Requirements:
GNUstep
libid3tag and libmad 0.15.0b
libvorbis 1.0.1 and libogg 1.1.0
libmpcdec 1.2
libmodplug 2.04
libaudiofile
ibflac
libavifile
libesd
libmusicbrainz
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