Personal Adrastos on 24 Jul 2007 04:58 am
Ubuntu -> Windows
I’ve set my laptop up as a dual-boot system now, so that I can do cross-platform development. Usually when you hear things like “I wish [program] was available for [operating system]“, it follows this pattern: “I wish [windows program] was available for [Open source operating system (or OSX)]“.
I wish there was Banshee for windows.
Now, originally (as with many linux music players and media management systems), it feels like Banshee was born out of the sentiment, “I wish there was iTunes for Linux”, but I’m using iTunes right now, and you know what? It’s not as good, and it’s not really iTunes’ fault, nor is it Banshee’s.
It’s Quicktime versus GStreamer.
You see, iTunes uses the Quicktime backend in order to play music, which gives it support for MP3, AAC, and (given a plugin) OGG files, and some others.
Windows Media Player also has its own backend, which provides support for MP3 and WMA, and given plugins a bunch of other filetypes.
GStreamer is one of a few media backends that run on many open source distributions, and powers most of their players, including Banshee. It has three basic sets of plugins: The ‘Good’, the ‘Bad’, and the ‘Ugly’. ‘Good’ plugins are for formats which are free and open source (Like OGG and FLAC). ‘Bad’ plugins are those that are free and open source, but that aren’t stable enough to be considered ‘good’. The ‘Ugly’ are codecs which have licensing issues, e.g. they may not be free of patents, etc. (thanks Anonymous for the correction)
With the GStreamer backend, one can play virtually any kind of file at all, as long as it is not encrypted.
What I noticed was that because MP3 lost its luster for me a while ago and I switched to FLAC, I can now only play approximately a quarter of my music library from iTunes on Windows.
Now, about a year ago I would have encoded all my files as MP3’s at 192 bits per second, and beyond that I would not care about the quality loss because I couldn’t hear it in the resultant files. This gets problematic however, because I write songs to CD’s. Taking a song as WAV, converting to MP3, and back, twice, can cause a drastic loss of sound quality because each conversion compounds the loss. FLAC, on the other hand is a variable bitrate format, so that if there is not much “happening” in the song, it will be a very small filesize, but the more detail there is, the higher the bitrate will raise. Theoretically, one should be able to convert from FLAC to WAV and back a hundred times without any problems.
I’m not a huge sound buff, but geez… I wish there was GStreamer for Windows.
