Version 8 of Reanimation of Snack

Updated 2008-05-23 14:43:49 by UKo

The last sign of life from the official Snack and Wavesurfer maintainers is from the year 2006 and the last release are from 2005. It would be a pity if this wonderful package dies and so we (UKo and lasselasse and...) want to start a sort of reanimation.

The first step is to collect the patches for different errors or enhancements that float around.

Then we have to clarify the future development:

  • will the official maintainers rise their hands and continue the development
  • will they at least hand the future of snack and wavesurfer to the community
  • or do we have to make a friendly fork to continue the development?

** Available patches

The first patch I will provide is a compile time option, to build snack without mp3-support to make it fully free (in the tcl sense).

** Diskussion

DKF: I advise only waiting a finite amount of time for a response from the official maintainers. Better to have a fork (and apologies) than to let something languish for want of the gumption to get on with it.

LV So, what is the situation with mp3? I mean, that format is the most commonly used format, cross platform. Now I see talk about a version of snack which doesn't support it, to be more free. I presume this means that someone in the world has a software patent and wants money from people who write MP3s?

If so, then what formats are being recommended as a replacement? Surely not wav, because who wants to get stuck in that format? And not the itunes default format (also proprietary).

I know about flac, ogg and a few other formats - but they are lossless, which means the files are horrendously larger, and few digial music devices (and for that matter, few programmatic players) support those formats easily.

ZB 23.05.2008: ogg (AKA "ogg-vorbis") is "lossy" format, which has serious advantages over MP3: it produces smaller files (or of the same size, but better quality), it's "variable rate" by default, and it's commonly recognized by about all software players, and by some hardware players (I mean: pocket, portable devices) as well. Because it's present already in snack, it's a replacement for MP3 just "ready for use".

So what alternatives are commonly usable other than these?

lasselasse: Snack comes from the area of speech science. wav is kind of the standard format there exactly because it is lossless. I would consider mp3 support rather a feature to increase popularity.

UKo The alternative I see is: mp3 ;-) To use snack in commercial software (like the rest of tcl) it is necessary to split the mp3 part from the rest. But my plan is to make it an extension like the ones for ogg/vorbis and nist/sphere. And hopefully this will lead to some more extensions like flac.

And it's not a problem with the format (though maybe the patent restrictions will cover it, too) but a problem with the license of the mp3 code used by snack -- here is the relevant part of the snack README:

  The only reason for GPL is the MPEG decoding code, see jkFormatMP3.c.
  If you remove that code it is possible to use a license similar to
  the one Tcl/Tk uses (BSD style) and to include Snack in any software
  on the same terms.