Developing Guadeque

Use this category to discuss anything related to the development of Guayadeque.
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l300lvl
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Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2011 12:21 pm

Developing Guadeque

Post by l300lvl »

Hey I'm not really a coder or programmer but I was wondering what all it might take just to start writing C which is what I believe guayadeque is written in? What would I use as an ide and how would I browse the code? Is there access to any of this information, and also perhaps could this be in the wiki?

Maybe eventually this can be more of a community project and others can contribute to it by providing hacks or tweaks even if very simple? I'm mostly just curious and want to play around at coding something like Guayadeque, and maybe that will help me understand what I'd like to see it grow into in the future and what I really expect out of a music player.

Lately I realize Guayadeque is by far the most experienced program with music lovers in mind which actually handles large libraries, as other players either lack things like Album Artist, still. Or they are bulky where they should not be, or they lack customization in many areas, as well as most just cant handle a library over 10k tracks even when they boast that handling huge libraries is their main feature.

Guayadeque is number one by far, with probably Banshee running behind at number 2 which was closely tied with gmusicbrowser which has too many features that are useless or it doesn't understand how to just play music and even after tweaking every little thing it is still full of bugs and bulk and then can't handle a large library, then that R-box still wont do what it needs to do to be logical and future proof. Others, bulk, poorly written, run on java, too many bugs, not enough features, etc etc etc.

Are there any forks of Guayadeque out there?

I have many questions about the future of Guayadeque, as it now my number one choice over all.

Last question, would it be possible to perhaps 'fork' one of the 'Views' and then have guayadeque see views as sort of plug-ins where as we could write new ones and Guayadeque could use the new views for more advanced customization. If that makes sense. Sorry this is so long.
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anonbeat
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Developing Guadeque

Post by anonbeat »

To start understanding the guayadeque code you must first have knowledge of C++ which is the language guayadeque is coded.
Guayadeque uses wxWidgets as framework and you must be familiar with it in order to understand how exactly guayadeque works.
l300lvl
Posts: 226
Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2011 12:21 pm

Developing Guadeque

Post by l300lvl »

Understood. I looked over the source a bit and I do see why wxWidgets knowledge is also needed.

I was curious though:

If I wanted to chang for example the player control icons, play/pause/stop etc, would I just replace the pngs in the src/images/orig dir, or do I also need to create a new GQ_control_icons.svg somehow? Or is the svg only provided to mass update all icons? I'm looking to do something more like a squared button for icons is why I ask, and it seems like it should be easy enough.
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anonbeat
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Joined: Thu Sep 16, 2010 9:47 pm

Developing Guadeque

Post by anonbeat »

to change the icons you just need to change the icons include files. Look at Image.cpp and Image.h files and the file it includes.
l300lvl
Posts: 226
Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2011 12:21 pm

Developing Guadeque

Post by l300lvl »

Thanks for that tip. I played around a bit and I was trying to do something a little more advanced and thought maybe you could help. Basically I thought it would be nice to have larger album thumbnails in the Album pane, so I went ahead and tried to modify AlListBox but I had no idea what I was doing and google didn't really help much as far as m_Thumb goes.

Would it be possible to somehow increase the size of the thumbnails?
l300lvl
Posts: 226
Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2011 12:21 pm

Developing Guadeque

Post by l300lvl »

Any luck this is at all possible?
Or is it possible to have the additional pane instead of replacing the current album list, I thought might be nice, like in Banshee, the 'Album Grid' as a pane so we could see albums along with album artist, genre, year, etc, like we used to be able to. Only this way it would just be part of the library/collection view.

Are there any big changes thought about for the GUI if a port to QT were to happen?

I don't think that Guayadeque should be just like every other player, but I do think things could be more organized and feature rich at the same time, but that won't happen if everyone leaves this project for other more active ones.

Is there a way a developer could currently submit commits or bug fixes, and as I asked somewhere else, has anyone seen any forks of Guayadeque that might be useful to burrow ideas/fixes/solutions from?
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anonbeat
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Joined: Thu Sep 16, 2010 9:47 pm

Developing Guadeque

Post by anonbeat »

Im currently working in another project and at the same time learning qt. I think qt is more stable and rich than wxWidgets.
About the interface I want to do some changes about the selection panes. And what you says is something that I want to do. Other idea is somehow decide how the selection cleans up other selections. For example now if you select a new artist the album selection gets cleaned. This is logical but you may want to give priority to years over artist for example and right now this is not possible.

I have many ideas but not much time.
l300lvl
Posts: 226
Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2011 12:21 pm

Developing Guadeque

Post by l300lvl »

I'm sure you have considered it, but I was just wondering why no one mentions GTK+ here? Doesn't sticking with gtk seem like a more logical choice considering the speed of it?

Have you done any benchmarks of any of the QT media players running with a layout similar to that of Guaya, and the same size library? How are the comparisons?

I have feared even installing QT apps, even after I already have libs pulled in, just due to the bad memory/cpu usage rumors and personal history I have had with it. But, perhaps I need to do more testing by pulling in all of QT to use something like Amarok for a while.

Another simple comparison is how long Amarok has been around vs Guayadeque, but I understand it could just be you're more skilled taking an entire project on instead of having multiple people which can lead to many problems, so maybe you can make QT work for us?
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