It's been very quiet on "radio GNUpod" for a while. Mostly because it simply works for me.
Last week however I felt like making some minor changes and realized how unreadable some Perl code becomes if you leave it alone for a while. So I looked for an IDE that would help me to quickly jump around in the code and found EPIC, an Eclipse extension that turns Eclipse into a Perl IDE. And all of a sudden Perl became fun again.
This is also good news if you are waiting for support of the newer iPod models. Supporting the newer sqlite based file formats and even the 3. generation shuffle (the no-buttons clip) will necessitate some deep changes in GNUpod's soft and squishy guts (mktunes and tunes2pod mostly) and without an IDE I was very reluctant to dive into that piece of code.
The last thing that kept me from rewriting those parts of gnupod was the absence of pain. My 3gen nano works like a charm.
But... the latest iPod nano (the 2010 model) looks mightily interesting. As much as I detest the closed-and-welded-shut policy that they have in regard to 3. party software, that much I have to admit that I like their hardware and usability department. So I soon may have an itch to scratch after all.
In the meantime however I am preparing the 0.99.9 release.
Three new tools to replace gnupod_search: gnupod_find, gnupod_modify, and gnupod_delete. They are not yet feature-complete as they can't yet add artwork, but they are in the git repository and you can always download the latest development snapshot here: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnupod.git/snapshot/master.tar.gz
After six years of absence GNUpod is back with a current release on ftp.gnu.org. The latest release up there was 0.29-rc1 :-/
So now our current release 0.99.8 gets mirrored again onto a bazillion ftp sites.
cheers
-henrik
BTW: I have officially been dubbed co-maintainer of GNUpod. So now you can officially blame me :-)
As announced last month the new GNUpod release 0.99.8 is done.
The download mirrors already contain gnupod-0.99.8.tgz.
This release is mostly a bugfix release. Ubuntu users in particular should no longer see mktunes hanging on auto detection of the fwguid and 4gen nano users will enjoy complete artwork support. There are only a few new features. Most notably the Replay Gain handling has been completely reworked.
As always the changes are listed in the CHANGES file:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnupod.git/tree/CHANGES?h=releases/0.99.8&id=release-0_99_8
For the truly curious here is a coloured diff between the 0.99.7 and 0.99.8:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnupod.git/diff/?h=releases/0.99.8&id=releases/0.99.8&id2=9721afa97a049bed7ed3afa4ec4c8bf725db0c8b
After almost a year it is time to prepare a new release.
It is almost done and a current snapshot of the 0.99.8 development can be downloaded here: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnupod.git/snapshot/gnupod-releases/0.99.8.tar.gz
This release is mostly a bugfix release. Ubuntu users in particular should no longer see mktunes hanging on auto detection of the fwguid and 4gen nano users will enjoy complete artwork support. There are only a few new features. Most notably the Replay Gain handling has been completely reworked.
Unless somebody finds a grave bug we will release the next version soon with the CHANGES mentioned here: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnupod.git/tree/CHANGES?h=releases/0.99.8
For the truly curious here is a coloured diff between the 0.99.7 and 0.99.8:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnupod.git/diff/?h=releases/0.99.8&id=releases/0.99.8&id2=9721afa97a049bed7ed3afa4ec4c8bf725db0c8b
...and the people rejoiced.
Now everybody can get a piece of gnupod by running
git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/gnupod.git
This creates a gnupod sub directory with the current
bleeding edge development version of gnupod.
One more
autoconf
configure
make install
and you've got it installed.
Please uninstall a previous version of gnupod if you installed
it from your distribution's packet management system (in Ubuntu
and Debian the packet is called "gnupod-tools") as the paths for
installing perl modules might differ and you may end up with two
installed versions of some gnupod modules and executables.
Highlights:
* Added --bitrate switch to gnupod_search.pl
* Fixed some escaping problems in GNUtunesDB.xml
* Added --podcast-files-limit to gnupod_addsong.pl
Check out the CHANGES file for a more complete list of changes.
Highlights:
* Support for multiple On-The-Go Playlists
* Added Support for m4a 'gnre' Tag
* Small iPod-Shuffle bugfixes
Highlights:
Support for UNICODE, faster, cleaner code.. etc :)