Sonance 0.2.1 review

GNOME audio player based on GStreamer and Mono. Sonance is a brand spankin' new audio player based on the GStreamer media library

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Aaron Bockover

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GNOME audio player based on GStreamer and Mono.

Sonance is a brand spankin' new audio player based on the GStreamer media library and is developed on the Open Source Mono .NET Platform, written in C#. It uses the gst-sharp GStreamer bindings, which are currently only available via CVS.

Version 0.2 now supports shuffle/repeat modes, playlist searching, recursive directory additions, and saves the window/widget states in GConf.

Sonance may currently act as a simple drop-in XMMS/Beep replacement. It sports a basic playlist, with add/remove/clear/reorder support, and metadata support through GStreamer. Now that Sonance has a stable base, the goal is to create an entire music organization and playback platform, much like Rhythmbox and iTunes.

However, Sonance will have a much smaller footprint, and will be more versatile: you don't have to utilize a music library. Sometimes it's just nice to have a standalone player that isn't dependent on any kind of database.

Sonance is multi-threaded. Playback is always smooth and fast, based on a solid, featureful GStreamer core, and adding lots of files to the playlist is no problem, because additions are done in a separate thread. Sonance is easy to use, simple, yet powerful, and its future is very bright.

Requirements:
Sonance is developed under the Mono platform.
As such, it requires the Mono Runtime, Mono Class Libraries and C# Compiler, and Gtk#.
It also requires gst-sharp, which is only available from Mono CVS (see Sonance web site for details).

What's New in This Release:
This version adds many great new features, including an improved interface, Firefox-like playlist searching, shuffle and repeat modes, directory reading and recursion for playlist additions, a playlist addition dialog (GTK File Selector), and GConf support for saving window attributes and widget states (volume, shuffle, repeat toggles, etc.).

Note: to bring up the Playlist Search Bar, you can either press 'J', 'F3', or 'CTRL+F.' It works just like XMMS/Beep's Jump feature.