News

News

Thursday, January 27th, 2000

Kmp3-1.0 released.

Finaly we managed the Kmp3 version 1.0 final. That will be the last version available for KDE 1.x (except bugfix releases Kmp3 1.x).

Here is the list of changes:

– added/completed translations

– fixed command line behaviour

– fixed positioning problem with winamp skins

– winamp skin fine tuning

– 100dpi font fitting problems banned

– improved random mode

– fixed bug in configure scripts

– added sample winamp skin

– updated FAQ

Found some bugs? Well, then email a detailed report. Someone will be sure to get back to you soon after you send the email. We can’t fix ‘em if we don’t know about them, so send those reports in!

Monday, November 15th, 1999

Kmp3-1.0pre3 released.

Just getting closer to the 1.0! This is the last pre-release before releasing the final Kmp3 1.0. It is your last chance to put in your own translations, draw a fancy new icon or a cool new logo

Here is the list of changes:

– Fine tuning in winamp skin support.

– Added a few new translations.

– Some finetuning on the player engine

– Removed most of the flickering in Winamp Mode

– Made Winamp Mode more native. Still no support for shade mode.

– Connected clutter bar in winamp mode

– Bugfixes in playlist and quick panel

– Added Quick Help. Just press the right mouse button on some widgets in the config dialogs

– Rewritten about dialog

– Fixed fifo bug – it caused Kmp3 to hang at start

Wednesday, November 3rd, 1999

We’ve introduced a CVS repository for Kmp3. So you can stay up to date with our latest and greatest version of Kmp3. How to use it? Watch out for our download page.

If Kmp3 should speak YOUR language in version 1.0, you should get the po files. Fill in your language strings below the english ones into the field msgstr=”your string”. Then send them to Antoine Laydier.

Friday, October 22nd, 1999

We need your help! Before going to version 1.0, we wanna have some more translations. If you want to spend some minutes for that task, please contact Antoine Laydier. He will send you some more information about that. — Thanks.

Tuesday, September 27th, 1999

First the bad news: We currently have some technical problems with our main server. Our sysop is low on time, so his real work is his first choice. Please be patient with this and use one of our mirrors. – Thank you!

Puhhh – yes, you are right: This break was too long. Sorry for that, but we are all too busy. Now we have for you the Kmp3-1.0pre2 tarball. Ready for your desktop with several enhancements and bug fixes…

Here is the list of changes:

– The tag reading of the playlist editor is done in a timer loop now. This makes things a bit more comfortable.

– Added winamp skin support. It is still not flickerfree and has a positioning bug.

– Got back missing translations

– Fixed dock widget status bug when playlist has finished

– Removed segfault when displaying the “Incompatible plugin” message. Now the user can see it.

– Removed segfault when trying to access a not existing dock widget.

– Read lyrics (no display)

– Read new information in tag : “song nr”

– Fixed read of tag when starting kmp3

– Fixed size of columns in playlist editor

– New display options: %f (filename), %e (extension)

– Changed display option %7: Now it displays the “Song Nr”

– New polish translations

Thursday, July 15th, 1999

Whelps, your friendly server administrator has decided to setup a real server machine for kmp3.org. That means that kmp3.org will only be used as a server. Previously, it was also used for Kmp3 development, games, you name it, which meant that the system crashed every so often. As a result, this Web site will be experiencing a little downtime shortly, but it will be back up and running before you can say “Kmp3 kicks some serious mp3 butt!”. Well, maybe not that fast . BTW, the Kmp3 team extends a warm thanks to all you guys and gals who put up with us through the last month and a half of no updates! Yes, we plan to continue to work on Kmp3, and yes, kmp3.org is here to stay. Also, we apologize for the absolute lack of response to all the kmp3-feedback e-mail. The person in charge of e-mail feedback (who also happens to be the one who runs this server and is currently writing this news blurb… ehem, that would be Aaron) sort of went into “slacker-mode” and is slowly starting to get back into “Kmp3-mode”. If you sent an e-mail, you’ll get a response, promise . OK, so see y’all in a bit!

Wednesday, July 14th, 1999

Hi! Here we are again after a real long break from Kmp3. We all were very low on time during the last month(s). But now you can get some stuff that is really amazing Here are the changes:

- Fixed the drag’n drop capabilities of Kmp3, now it works again

- Modified drop features (only files can be droped on the player, files & directories are only allowed in the playlist editor)

- Modified the playlist editor to show tag informations

- The User can choose the columns which should be displayed in the playlist editor

- Save the positions and size of columns of the playlist editor

- Fixed the bug that occurs when pressing up or down arrow on the combobox used to select path in the playlist editor.

- Added a feature to the playlist editor : Now, the right click unselected all selected song in the editor.

- Fixed the bug when loading the playlist

- Added feature in playlist editor to rename file by using the tag informations

- Bug fix in playlist editor (crash when list is empty)

- Check if a file added is already in the playlist and ask for add it again

- Added a dock control panel, reachable through a middle mouseclick on the docking pic

- Updated the plugin class, to handle the filename changes correctly

Sunday, May 30th, 1999

This development version of Kmp3 fixes an annoying bug and introduces the cool feature of setting the current song to bold in the playlist editor! Here are the changes:

- Fixed a “take X11 with me” bug in some cases when closing Kmp3 (reproducable when launching Kmp3, pressing play, pressing stop and choosing quit/close – save your data first)

- The current song is now shown with bold text in the playlist editor

Friday, May 28th, 1999 (Part Two)

Ah, it’s a very special day when three of the four Kmp3 developers make substantial contributions, and today is one of those days. This version has new features, various bug fixes and a number of different user interface enhancements, many of them in the Playlist Editor. Plus, the rare freeze bug that could happen in the previous release has been eliminated. Keep in mind that this is the second release in less than 24 hours.

or the Redhat KDE 1.1 binary RPM. While you are waiting for your download to complete, you can read through the latest list of changes:

- Fixed rare freeze problem introduced in last version

- The path and filename of the current playlist now appear in the title of the Playlist Editor

- When adding songs to the playlist with the Playlist Editor, right pane now “follows” songs as they are added

- When adding songs to the playlist with the Playlist Editor, new songs in the right pane become selected, while the songs in the left pane become unselected

- After selecting a song in the playlist with the Playlist Editor (by double-clicking on it or single-clicking on it and pressing the Enter key), the song immediately becomes unhighlighted

- On the Playlist Editor, “Save” now saves the current playlist or asks for a file to save as if there is no current file associated with the playlist (i.e. one created with New playlist); “Save As” now always asks for the filename

- When the Playlist Editor is opened, it now centers the right pane around the current song

- When double-clicking on a file in the Playlist Editor that hasn’t been “officially” added to the playlist yet (via “Apply” or “Ok”), the user is now asked to first add the file to the playlist before being able to the play the song

- Fixed one pixel height changes in group boxes on skin settings tab that occurred when switching back and forth between previewing the default skin and Winamp skins

- Added additional checks when previewing Winamp skins to make sure loaded images

- On player, if the artist and title are empty (but there is a tag), now displaying filename instead of nothing (same for docking playlist and docking tooltip)

- Fixed minor appearance problem with Playlist Editor when moving selected song(s) all the way to the end of the playlist

- Fixed missing time display when the seek bar was moved

- On the Playlist Editor, “Load” now clears the previous playlist before loading a new playlist file

- Fixed problems with “Ok” and “Apply” buttons on Playlist Editor

- Possibly dealt with all compilation warning messages that would appear when using certain compilers (like g++)

- Updated German translations

Found some bugs? Well, then please e-mail a detailed report. Someone will be sure to get back to you soon after you send the email. We can’t fix ‘em if we don’t know about them, so send those reports in! Also, we want to hear your feature requests!

Friday, May 28th, 1999

Have we got a release for you! This version fixes many bugs and implements some of the changes you have requested. Plus, there are new translations for five different languages. And, let’s not forget that there are over 20 different changes since the last release!

OK, there is a slight problem with this release, unfortunately. Very rarely, Kmp3 may complete freeze on you. In this case, the only thing that you can do is kill both Kmp3 processes and start the player again. This problem was introduced as a result of one of the latest fixes, and the Kmp3 team is working on a solution. Even with the freeze, however, there are enough new things to definitely make it worth the download.

or the Redhat KDE 1.1 binary RPM. While you are waiting for your download to complete, you can read through the latest list of changes:

- Fixed the fast seconds problem that occurred with various mp3s

- Fixed seek bar placement problem that occurred for the first seconds of most mp3s

- If Kmp3 is currently stopped and user selects a new song from the docking playlist popup menu or double-clicks on a song in the Playlist Editor, it automatically plays now

- Fixed problem with audio device (i.e. /dev/dsp) not being closed when the player was stopped

- Fixed problem where seconds on the time display weren’t all the same time length, although the average over all the seconds was correct

- Fixed problem that some people experienced with filenames containing a “-” in docking module

- Fixed font problem with player window that occurred when the user changed the default window font with kcmdisplay

- Fixed seekbar problem, where it didn’t reach the end

- Possibly dealt with all remaining qdir.h include problems

- Added complete Czech translations from Jiri Danes

- Added complete Danish translations from Erik Kj�r Pedersen

- Got practically complete Greek translations from Yiannis Belias

- Updated German translation and base POT file; also added additional comments

- Added initial Italian translations from Stefano Bodrato

- Removed code that checks to make sure KDEDIR is set–it was not necessary for correct operation of Kmp3

- Removed “–no-kdedir-check” command-line switch, since no longer necessary

- Changed “Tolerant fuzzy search” to “Allow wildcards” on misc settings tab

- Changed “fuzzy” to “strict” on misc settings tab

- Changed “strip filename” and “strip extension” to “Strip filename” and “Strip extension” on the display settings tab, respectively, to be more consistent with the appearance of the rest of the tab

- Fixed incorrect comment in po file

Tuesday, May 25th, 1999

Hey there–so far, we’ve had a very productive week: a total of 18 changes! Along with some user interface enhancements that will make the use of Kmp3 more pleasant, both the French and German translations are complete for this release.

You can get the source tarball or the Redhat KDE 1.1 binary RPM. While you are waiting for your download to complete, you can read through the latest list of changes:

- Kmp3 now keeps track of the location of the Playlist Editor between sessions and starts the Playlist Editor in the same location it was previously in

- While running Kmp3, all secondary dialogs now remember their positions after they are closed (however, only the Playlist Editor remembers its position between Kmp3 sessions)

- If secondary window (like Playlist Editor) is open and user tries to run it, it now becomes the active window

- If secondary window (like Playlist Editor) is open and on another desktop, the window is now moved to the current desktop and made active when the user tries to run it

- When shuffle is pressed, if current song is either paused or playing, Kmp3 continues with this song as the current song

- The French translations (for this rev of Kmp3) have been completed by R�al Corriveau!

- Updated Czech translations

- Added some missing German translations

- Added “check3DNOW” binary to provide an automatic detection for AMD 3DNow!(TM) capable CPUs (for now, Linux only)

- Repaired configSkin to handle the small/large change correctly

- Possibly fixed gcc internal compiler error with missing KDockedApplication destructor

- Possibly fixed problems with garbled audio

- Possibly fixed qdir.h compilation errors (again!)

- Added message to the end of configure that informs the user what to do next (i.e. run make….)

- Added message to the end of make install that provides various tidbits of information about Kmp3

- Changed all instances of 3DNOW or 3D-NOW to say 3DNow!, which is AMD’s actual text, also specifying AMD where it might not be clear

- Removed semi-colon after “QOBJECT” in musicBrowser.h, which could potentially cause problems for some compilers

- Made minor change to merge_translations script so comments are not repeated over and over again

Saturday, May 22nd, 1999

In this release, you won’t find any new goodies, but enough things have changed, especially a very annoying bug with tags, that it’s worth the download.

Translators take note: with this release, Kmp3 has become much easier (and satisfying) to translate. The addition of comments throughout pot files along with the elimination of many strings that were in old pot files should drastically reduce the amount of work required to complete a translation. If you would like to translate Kmp3, first make sure that it hasn’t already been translated into your language and then follow the directions in the FAQ!

or the Redhat KDE 1.1 binary RPM. While you are waiting for your download to complete, you can read through the latest list of changes:

- Added comments to the translations file–this will make it a lot easier for translaters to translate Kmp3!

- Considerably reduced the number of user-visible strings, which, in turn, reduces the amount of time required to do a translation

- Updated Dutch, Finnish, French and German translations

- Fixed bug where the genre and comment were read incorrectly from an mp3′s tag

- Fixed bug where Auto did not work on mp3s without tags

- Layout/sizing of Playlist Editor has been rewritten to remember its last layout/size

- Added layout to About box which allows it to be resized

- Changed plugin configuration window to look better; also changed the title of the window to be more representative of its function

- Changed “Title”, “Album”, etc. to “Title:”, “Album:”, etc. on both Tag Editor and first Music Browser tab.

- Switched locations of “Artist” and “Title” entries on Music Browser and Tag Editor

- Switched places of “small” and “normal” skin in skin combo box

- Changed “normal” to “large” in skin combo box

- Changed “Song” to “Title” on Display settings tab to be more consistent with the rest of the dialogs

- Added keyboard shortcuts to Music Browser (which helped to reduce number of strings needing translations

- Allowed playlist filter string to be translated

- Rewrote MusicMatch reading procedure to be more robust

- Removed unnecessary i18n’s in playlist.cpp

- Modified translation script

- Updated TODO list with many items that still need to be done

Saturday, May 15th, 1999

We just can’t help it–there have been enough changes since the last release to warrant a new release, one that we are sure you will want. Kmp3′s playlist editor gets a new look in this release, and that means… new graphics! For about a month, the playlist editor has been a little broken, but no more–check it out! Memory consumption has also been reduced in this release.

or the Redhat KDE 1.1 binary RPM. We should have a Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 RPM soon. While you are waiting for your download to complete, you can read through the latest list of changes:

- Added graphical button toolbar to playlist editor, which replaces the old plain-text buttons

- Added new icons (new graphics!) for use on the playlist editor toolbar

- Reduced memory consumption on startup by about 1/2 MB

- Made playlist editor’s menu bar and toolbar floatable

- Added functionality to remember placement of playlist editor’s menu bar and toolbar the next time Kmp3 is run

- Fixed layout/sizing problems on playlist editor

- Really added layout management to miscellaneous settings tab

- Fixed many grammar and spelling errors in user-visible strings

- Made it easier to translate some messages that were previously concatenated from multiple strings

- Updated base translation file and made it so more strings are added to the base translation file using xgettext

- Created a tiny script for creating base translation file and merging it with the translations

- Added entries to CREDITS file

Friday, May 14th, 1999 (Part Two)

How’s that for a day? 28 changes in less than 24 hours! Half of them are in the version that was released earlier today (Portland, Oregon, USA time, at least), and half of them are in the version that is featured in the previous news release. This release offers two new features and fixes some annoying bugs that have been with Kmp3 since buffers support was added about two months ago.

Redhat KDE 1.1 binary RPM. We should have a Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 RPM soon. While you are waiting for your download to complete, you can read through the latest list of changes:

- Added right-click popup menu to main window–user can right-click on main window and get a popup menu with various functions similar to docking popup menu

- Fixed a bug that caused Kmp3 to stop playing some songs before getting to the end

- Possibly fixed intensive CPU usage problem when player is paused

- Removed the “Adding the directory will add all its sub-directories and can take a long time. Continue?” warning message that appeared when adding a directory using the playlist editor

- Added ability to click on the color boxes on the Display settings tab and get the same window that appears when the respective “Change” buttons are pressed

- Made the default skin size small, so the first time Kmp3 is used, it will be in “small mode”

- Removed display of file extensions on Plugins settings tab and, in its place, now displaying the file type(s) associated with the plugin

- Balance slider popup menu now disappears as soon as user lets go of mouse button no matter where cursor is

- Slightly changed description of mpg123 MPEG audio plugin

- Changed main player window title to say “Kmp3″ instead of “kmp3″

- Changed title of Configuration/Settings screen from “Kmp3 Configuration” to “Kmp3 Settings” to match the string used on the player popup menu

- Updated base translations and German translations

- Fixed minor typo in mpg123 plugin base configure file

- Began differentiating various plugin types (i.e. audio, visual and extension)

If you haven’t already gone through the changes made in the first half of the day, you can learn more by reading the next news blurb.

Friday, May 14th, 1999

Update mania! We have a new development version for you, chock full of bug fixes and the addition of one new feature. Plus, there are some neat updates to the Web site.

One exciting new addition to Kmp3 is the support for MusicMatch (TM) mp3 tags. This proprietary format is used for many mp3s that you can find on the ‘Net, but most mp3 players (besides MusicMatch’s) cannot understand the format. Now, thanks in part to Jack Diederich, Kmp3 supports this tag format.

Wanna see what some of the people responsible for Kmp3 look like? Well, then head over to the credits page for some in-your-face mug shots.

It seems like we are getting at least one new translation every month. This month, Czech joins the ever-growing list of languages that Kmp3 has been translated into. Thanks to Jiri Danes for providing the translations!

A quick note for (potential) FreeBSD users. This version should fix many of the problems you have been having with regards to configuring, compiling and linking Kmp3. When you “make” Kmp3, make sure you use gmake instead of regular BSD make. If you do not have gmake, get it from the Ports collection. This release does everything on FreeBSD… except for playing mp3s! Don’t worry–we’re working on it. In addition, apparently the old (but stable) version of Kmp3, 0.2.2, has been ported to FreeBSD by Oscar Bonilla and added to the Ports collection. Read more about it at this Dejanews Usenet/mailing list post.

Quick note for Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 users. Kmp3 compiles and installs without any problems on OpenLinux 2.2, so just download the tarball (mentioned in the next blurb) and compile and install it.

Redhat KDE 1.1 binary RPM. We should have a Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 RPM soon. While you are waiting for your download to complete, you can read through the latest list of changes:

- Added support for reading MusicMatch (TM) mp3 tags–thanks to Jack Diederich for providing his MusicMatch source code

- Fixed extremely annoying bug where playlist was saved twice for each new playlist addition

- Reworked docking icons to be transparent. Also implemented the concept of transparency. Now, the docking icon background matches the background of the panel

- Fixed crash bug that occurred when the user performed the following operations: activate playlist editor, save current list, click on new, edit the new list, click on save

- Added self-resizing layout to the display config tab

- Added Czech translations from Jiri Danes

- Changed “QT 1.3″ error message which occurred in configure when unable to find QT headers or includes to just say “QT” and also be more helpful regarding the possible cause of the problem

- Reworked “Can’t find X includes” configure message to be more helpful regarding the possible cause of the problem

- Fixed configure to check for DL library instead of assuming that it exists

- Fixed miscellaneous Makefile and configure problems that caused FreeBSD compilation and linking to fail

- Removed C++-style comments in MPEG audio C files so Kmp3 compiles on FreeBSD

- Updated base translation file; also updated German translations

- Got rid of “High priority” console print-out when the MPEG audio plugin has high priority set

- Updated INSTALL file with latest info on which systems support Kmp3

Thursday, May 6th, 1999

A new development version with enhancements and fixes is out!

Here’s the list of changes:

- Double-clicking on a song in the playlist editor now makes Kmp3 jump to that song. Pressing also jumps to the last song selected/unselected.

- Made Auto button in the tag editor keep fields if Auto returns empty or if checkbox is set

- Fixed compilation problem for Solaris in kmixer.cpp

- Additional architecture, Solaris x86, added to configure

- Added self-resizing layouts to the skin and plugin config tabs. This will make it easier to view translations!

- Updated German translations

Tuesday, May 4th, 1999

No code updates today (so far), but some major updates to the Web site. You won’t be able to see the majority of the work unless you are using a Web browser like lynx, however. A new credits page has been added, which replaces the old authors page. On the credits page you can learn who everyone is in the Kmp3 project, including the programmers, Web designers and more. You might even find your name on the list! A big thanks to everyone who has contributed to Kmp3!!

Monday, May 3rd, 1999

After a fairly long hiatus, we’ve got a new version for all you guys (and gals) to play with! This version fixes quite a few bugs and adds two new features. Yes, there are still some annoying bugs, but we’ll “make them go away” as soon as we can reproduce them (just kidding)!

Kmp3 now does Hungarian. Thanks to Mer�nyi Mikl�s for providing the translations!

OK, here’s the latest slew of changes:

- Added feature where Kmp3 remembers whether it was exited in hidden or shown state and restarts the player in the same state

- Fixed session management bug where window would not restart on same desktop

- Added additional command-line parameter that allows user to start Kmp3 hidden

- Fixed hiding bug where if window started hidden, showing it caused it to appear in the upper left hand corner of desktop instead of the same position that it previously appeared in (if remember position setting is enabled)

- Fixed docking hide/show bug where if user manually dragged window to another desktop and hit the docking icon, it did not hide

- Added Hungarian translations from Mer�nyi Mikl�s

- Updated Danish translations

- May have fixed any remnant QDir compilation errors

- Changed versioning info to “1.0-pre” instead of “pre1.0″

- Made minor changes to look of console help

- Fixed various spelling mistakes in console help

- Fixed spelling and formatting errors in incompatible plugin message

- Changed “default skin is allowed” message to “default skins are allowed”

Redhat KDE 1.1 binary RPM.

Found some bugs? Well, then please e-mail a detailed report to kmp3-feedback@kmp3.org. Someone will be sure to get back to you soon after you send the email. We can’t fix ‘em if we don’t know about them, so send those reports in!

Sunday, April 18th, 1999

Here we are! Cool testing stuff for the new week . This version mainly contains fixes to serious bugs and these improvements:

- made new “KDEDIR is not set” routine, no real check if it is set correctly, but it checks if it is set. The messages saying “KDEDIR is not set…” belong to the past now.

- changed high priority behaviour – the playback loop is now called faster when this option is enabled. Produces more static sound on very slow CDROM drives.

- added missing translation in plugHandler.cpp

Friday, April 16th, 1999

Oops – fixed one little typo that causes tagEditor not to be shown. Sorry

You can get the source tarball.
Thursday, April 15th, 1999

The last day has proven to be extremely productive for the Kmp3 team. This version addresses five of the fourteen items from the previous TODO list. In other words: This version is a must-have for you .

Here’s the list of changes:

- fixed plugin loader bug, which causes kmp3 to run on linux only

- added russian translation

- added charset recoding for cyrillic charsets

- updated general po file

- updated german translation

- made “Auto” button work again in tag editor

- implemented correct autostart when using session management

- fixed disabling part when plugins with same extension are loaded

- made configure tab non modal

- added “APPLY” button to the config dialog

Friday, April 9th, 1999

In this release we fixed the X11/KDE logout problem, which causes kwm to hang. Some minor changes are included, too.

Here’s the list of changes:

- fixed X11/KDE logout problem

- changed Kmp3 base class to KTMainWindow

- enabled session management

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