1.4 of the RBEQ, the Rhythmbox Equalizer, is out and ready for download. The big change here is a switch from storing presets in a flat file to using the GStreamer Preset system. As always, downloads are at RBEQ Google Code.

A big thanks to Stefan Kost, who left this gem of a comment on the 1.3 release posting:

Any reason, you are not using the presets shipped with the gstreamer plugin?
Look at /usr/share/gstreamer-0.10/presets/GstIirEqualizer10Bands.prs and the GstPreset interface.
Users can install own presets to $HOME/.gstreamer-0.10/presets/

Since I didn't know anything about them, after looking at the aforementioned docs, I've gotten things so that they use the GStreamer Preset interface, and it is more well-behaved.

Also a big thanks to Hicham HAOUARI, whose awesome work has gotten RBEQ into Fedora! That's awesome; I was nearly flabbergasted when I saw that. Thank you for the support!

Comments and bug issues are always welcome; please let me know what you find while using it.

The previous statement isn't much of a surprise in this day in age, but I think I should qualify what I mean.

I've been having a lot of fun playing with the software internals of my new phone.

The Motorola Droid has been quite the versatile little device.  I've thrown nearly all I can think of at the thing, and it handles it smoothly and without issue.  In the past 4 weeks, I've rooted, flashed, reflashed (I'm indecisive), cleared, recovered, flashed again, and customized to my heart's content. Currently, it looks like this:

That's right... Shiny.

There's a fantastic community of people who create and contribute to these modifications over at alldroid.org, particularly in the forums.  I've met some good people out there, who really know what they're doing.

I recently dual-booted my desktop, so I could get back in and do some fun playing around.  Unfortunately, I chose a 64-bit operating system, and they're not supported for the android source tree and utilities. (A poor excuse, I want to see what I can do to fix that.) So I've been debating the past couple days, whether or not to clear my new install, and put on Ubuntu 32-bit edition when it comes out, so that I can tear into the source and help contribute to the site.  Most likely I'll wait until 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) comes out; I've loved what I've seen and played around with so far, so it'll be good to get in there and play around with my phone's internals.

One of the big requests on the alldroid forums is the ability to hot-swap phone ROMS without the need for a full reboot.  I think I have an idea on how to accomplish that.  In the same way that the Xen environment handles virtualization, we need to create a custom kernel that handles virtual ROM running. There would obviously be a performance hit, but with people overclocking their droids to 800MHz up to 1.3 GHz, I don't think there would be much complaining.  Basically, we need to let the ROM handle hardware switching from one ROM to the next, and let the internals provide the rom connection.

Just having ideas.  Others include a complete revamp of the Web, and a new OS.  I'll get to those at another time.

Other phone screenshots:

"The more screwed up the process, the longer you have a job."

How does that make you feel? Does it bother or amuse you? Would you feel uncomfortable hearing it from a coworker? A boss? When does the statement cross the line, if ever? As a programmer, you strive to produce the best product possible. When is there a "good enough" point? If something is broken, but acceptable, is that ethically capable of being released? Is a project that has no (unit, acceptance, ui, etc.) testing capable of release?

Let me know in the comments.

(PS: wrote this post from my Motorola Droid, which I'm having an absolute blast with)

That being said, I saw that someone was having trouble with the recent release of Ubuntu, and so I thought, as maintainer, I should, well, maintain. I've got Rhythmbox pulled down onto the laptop, and I'll throw a couple of songs and the plugin on there, to see how everything behaves. Hopefully, there should be an update with some added functionality (saving and loading preferences was a big request) by the end of November.

Yes, a month plus later than expected, RBEQ version 1.1 is out.

Updates since the last release:

• The window for the equalizer no longer wrests control away from Rhythmbox itself.  This makes it easier to change the EQ and play with volume and songs to get things working optimally.
• Added GConf hooks to allow persistent states for the equalizer between sessions.  Most requested feature from the previous release.
• Full base-code rewrite, much cleaner to work with and understand.

Next up, adding a load-save functionality to the EQ so that you can swap settings on the fly.

As always, the download is located here, and the install instructions are the same.

Download from http://rbeq.googlecode.com

Installation instructions:

• Open a terminal, and enter this:

tar -xvzf rbeq-1.3.tar.gz -C ~/.gnome2

• That's it!  You're set.

Hope that this release is as popular as the last.

Chris

I've finally gotten to the point where my basic rhythmbox equalizer is up and running, so I figured I'd let the package sit here as an available download.  I'll also link it to the rhythmbox devels, in hopes that it generates a bit more interest, and someone might come along and clean up and add to it more, in the true open source sense.

You can download the package here: Click Me!.

Installation instructions:

Uncompress this package using an archive utility (file-roller) to the ~/.gnome2 directory, or use the following command:

tar -xvzf rbeq-1.3.tar.gz -C ~/.gnome2

And that's it!  Open rhythmbox, and go to "Edit -> Plugins" and select "Rhythmbox Equalizer."

Screenshot (by request):

Screencap for the Rhythmbox EQ.

It feels good to finally have a project of my own out there to help the community.   Ciao!