Description

s.q.u.e.l.c.h is an Ogg Vorbis audio player. It features a sophisticated, innovative playlist manager and an integrated Vorbis tag editor.

Supports

  • Input : Ogg Vorbis.
  • Output : ALSA, aRts, esd, IRIX, OSS, NULL, Solaris, raw, AU, WAV.... anything supported by libao.

Features

  • Funky Playlist.
  • Auto-update of master playlist when audio tracks added/changed on disk.
  • Vorbis tag editor.
  • Smooth operation. Highly multi-threaded.
  • Uses Vorbis tags only for display track names. Filenames are irrelevant.
  • No gaps between tracks.
  • No skins. Read Skin Cancer for a nice tirade against skins.

Screenshots

Main window with my ‘web’ window manager style for KDE2

screenshot of squelch main window

Most of the s.q.u.e.l.c.h windows visible

Download

Current version, 1.0.1, is an update from 1.0 with some minor improvements to the build system, a fix for gcc-2.96 and to make it work with Qt 3.

squelch-1.0.1.tar.gz

I’m using Gentoo right now, so here’s an ebuild setup for it. You can unpack it in /usr/portage/media-sound and do ‘emerge squelch’

squelch-1.0.1-gentoo-1.4-ebuild.tar.gz

Requirements

Qt 2 or 3 from Trolltech

Qt must be compiled with -thread option !

Ogg Vorbis from Xiphophorous

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: top says that squelch is using 7.7M memory. Isn’t that excessive ?

A: top lies. Try reading /proc/(pid of squelch)/status if you’re on Linux.

Q: /proc/(pid of squelch)/status says that squelch has allocated 11.8M for data (VmData). Isn’t that excessive ?

A: That number is misleading. squelch uses threads and the implementation of threads on Linux is strange. For each running thread, Linux reserves 2M of virtual memory for its stack. For some reason, this number is shown as part of the VmData value. Note that the memory isn’t actually used, it’s just reserved for future use. squelch uses at least 3 subthreads all the time (input, output, directory watcher), so this number just looks silly.

If you want to see the effect of simply starting one subthread from an application on Linux, compile this program with gcc -o thread_test thread_test.c -pthread and cat /proc/(pid of thread_test)/status after each debug message. Notice how VmData leaps from ~32k to ~2M after the thread is created.

Q: Will you marry me ?

A: No.

Thanks

The Ogg Vorbis people have created a viable alternative to patented and closed-source audio codecs.

SourceForge kindly provide web-based project management tools.

David Lebel has kindly provided bug reports and feature suggestions.

Writing this software has taken, in total, approximately 2 working weeks of development time. Apparently it should have taken nearly 16 months.

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