Changes in this release:

• Re-bundling the Napster resolver, using a new API key.
• Hiding the stat heart-beat log in the log panel.
• Stat heart-beat check period increased (3s).
• Increased the time allowed for HTTP headers to (1s) and streams (2s).
• Increased the time allowed for resolver results (20s).
• Using more recent Python 2.7 for py2exe compiled resolvers.
• Including test player and audioscrobbler plugins again.
• Re-tweaked some resolver weights.

Download: Windar 0.2.3

Changes in this release:

• Changed licence from GPL to LGPL.
• Improved installer, with option to remove Application Data.
• Reduced the total file-size of the installer.
• Improved the Playdar state detection using the stat method.
• Updated to Erlang R014A, and reduced to bare essentials.
• Removed the Napster resolver and plugin. There is potential that this will be re-introduced in the next Windar release.
• Removed the MPlayer-powered test player to reduce installer size. It will require better error handling for failed web requests which might be recovered by MPlayer automatically.
• Removed the Scrobbler plugin as it required an auth hack. This had been intended to work with the test player, and may instead be made to work independently in a future release.
• Removed the Startup folder shortcut from the installer.

Download: Windar 0.2.1

The license for the original Spiffdar by Steven Gravell has recently been updated, allowing a new Playnode fork which is available for demo here. This new fork is provided under the GPL (v2 or newer) and includes recent versions of Prototype, Playdar.js and SoundManager. It has been trimmed-down a bit for now, and will be further developed.

It has not been easy to build Windar from source, until now.

• Pre-compiled binaries required have been compressed with 7-zip and added to GitHub.
• The main Windar solution is compatible with Visual Studio 2008 Express (free download).
• The page “Build and develop” has been added to the project wiki.

Since adding a test player and additional resolvers to the Windar download it grew from around 13.3mb to 20.4mb which seems a bit on the large side. The included Erlang core has been cut down further, removing redundant files, and the py2exe compiled Python resolver scripts are now done together, reducing the size too. The resulting installer file-size is 16.3mb and since the test player plugin might be provided as a separate download, this could bring the Windar download file-size back down to around 11.2mb.

Demo downloads for Windows and Java (Linux and others) to accompany the earlier demo for Mac OS X:

• Playnode Infinity demo for Windows
• Playnode Infinity demo for Java (Linux and others)

For the pure Java version, which is most suitable for Linux and other platforms, use the following command from within the extracted package content folder.

java -jar playnode-infinity.jar

Here’s a screenshot of the current Windows version of Playnode.

And here’s a screenshot of the Java version on Arch Linux with Gnome and Nimbus GTK theme.

Playnode Infinity requires Playdar to be installed and available with playlist content ready. The database for building playlists is only done so far as loading a playlist from XSPF. To get started simply load an XSPF file with a playlist with content to be resolved by Playdar. The resolver runs automatically when loading or selecting a persisted playlist. A playlist can be resolved again using the resolver button.

It’s not more than a demo for the moment due to the incomplete playlist functionality. When the playlist editor is ready, it will begin to be more useful

All future posts for Windar development will be posted to the playnode.org blog. News for all Playnode projects will be available here from now on.

Problems with tight coupling have been ironed-out using modules as interfaces. The decorator modules have been de-coupled. Database, player and resolver modules too.

All of those modules could have alternative implementations and some will. For example, an audio player in Java supporting Ogg and MP3 is included now, but there’s enough reason to consider additional players. The UI decorator modules would try to get the best from Swing across all and on some specific platforms such as Mac OS X where it could look and feel native.

The database de-coupling removes dependency on annotation classes. However, there might be good reason to develop a smaller faster database at some stage too.

The following diagram provides an overview of the project modules and their dependencies.

The orange module is the main GUI module. The modules shown in green are the interface modules which are used to de-couple the core modules.

The de-coupled modules are loaded at runtime with class names provided in the configuration properties file. The interfaces for these are explicit, reasonably clean but likely unfinished.

Work continues on a nice cross-platform Swing UI. The CrossPlatformDecorator class is part working, and will be using the Swing Metal Ocean look and feel.