annotate NEWS @ 4736:e14398ef0868

remove some code duplication

Audacious 1.5.0 (2008-03-13)
============================
This is the last branch of Audacious that will support in Winamp2 skins
in core. We are working on a new default UI for Audacious2 which provides
a more metadata rich environment (while still be lightweight and fast).
However, it is planned to implement support for Winamp2 skins as a plugin in
the next version. No promises, though.

It has been fun being seen as "rescuing XMMS" by the community; but this
has never been our goal. Our goal has always been to develop the best
possible player on Linux. This means that we are audiophiles, and we want
our audio to sound as nice as possible. This has been our primary goal;
not maintaining a Winamp2 skinned player. When we determined that the current
UI implementation was getting in our way, we decided to rip it out. As such,
the future of Winamp2 skins in Audacious is undefined, but they will probably
be supported via a plugin.

Enhancements
------------
* Everything between 1.4.1 and 1.4.7. (duh)
* Ability to disable GTK+ theme suggestions provided by skins.
* Entirely from scratch audio engine (libSAD) which supports:
  - 16-bit audio
  - 24-bit audio
  - 32-bit audio
  - IEEE floating point audio
  - 28-bit fractional audio
  - many weird obscure "audiophile" formats
  and:
  - high quality dithering/conversion/resampling to produce as
    high quality audio as possible for your sound system.
  - bit-exact passthrough of decoded audio (compare to
    "kernel streaming" in foobar2000)
  As a result, support for oldschool 8-bit soundcards has been
  _dropped_. It's 2008, they haven't made such hardware since the
  early 90's.
  Additionally, codecs now send audio to audacious using their
  native format; removing the need for costly implementation-specific
  conversion functionality.
* New unified metadata editing for most formats. Ability to see
  "raw metadata"; the metadata which can be used in tuplez scripts.
* Removal of the XMMS audio conversion engine in it's entirety.
* Support for "virtual plugins"; the ability for a single module to
  export up to thousands of plugins. This will be used more in Audacious2.
* Many adjustments to the winamp2 skinengine.
* Faster jump-to-file.
* Implement support for session management.

Bugfixes
--------
* playlist_compare_artist(): Avoid NULL dereferences.
  (Bugzilla #172, Bugzilla #168, Bugzilla #35).
* Tons of memory leaks fixed.


Audacious 1.4.1 (2007-11-17)
============================

Enhancements
------------
* The skin code has been tweaked a little to fix loading of
  more substandard winamp skins.
  (http://boards.nenolod.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=859)
* Playlists now carry an atomic serial number in order to avoid
  unnecessary reloading of metadata.
* The command names used by audtool have been sanitized in order
  to make some level of sense.
* Add many new calls to libaudclient which were unimplemented after
  DBus transition.
* Add error reporting when Tuplez scripts fail to compile.
* Use a hashtable of extension to codec candidate lists to speed up 
  codec detection.
* Make on demand codec detection use the hashtable to filter out unplayable 
  files.
* Codec detection is now done on demand by default. Due to the recent 
  rework of the codec detection system, this is the recommended setting.
  (Audacious can process a large directory in only a few seconds of blocking 
   this way, and streams are entirely processed in background this way.)
* Add codec and quality fields to MPRIS TrackInfo tuples sent over DBus.

Bugfixes
--------
* [Bugzilla #53]: UTF-8 validation gives false positives
  (Reported by Kosma Moczek; Fixed by Yoshiki Yazawa)
* [Bugzilla #20]: status icon plugin breaks the 'always on top' feature
  (Reported by Dorian Scholz; Fixed by Tomasz Moń)
* playback_get_length() was returning the typecode of FIELD_LENGTH, not
  it's value
* audctrl.h was dependent on #ifdef __cplusplus being a valid macro,
  now we use G_BEGIN_DECLS/G_END_DECLS to handle that.
* Fix doublesize issues on startup. (Gentoo #199071)
* Fix possible glitches that could be triggered by a scrolling textbox,
  when the skin is switched.
* Fix improper handling of integer constants in the Tuplez 
  compiler/evaluation engine.
* Fix misleading assertion notice triggers when a URI fails to load.
* Cope with Winamp2 skins which do not have dashes in numbers.bmp.


Audacious 1.4.0 (2007-11-01)
============================

* Everything ;)


Audacious 1.3.0 (2007-03-02)
============================

Enhancements
------------
* The playlist code has been rewritten using conditional variables, 
  which has resulted in speed improvements for the playlist code overall.
* The behaviour for detecting filemagic has been redone and is now more
  scalable.
* DoubleSize support has been improved significantly.
* Race conditions in produce_audio() have been corrected.
* The playlist editor is now properly drawn in shaded mode.
* g_utf8_validate has been replaced with a more strict utf8 validator, 
  which solves the encapsulated UTF-8 phenomenon properly.
* The controlsocket code no longer uses the stack in an improper manner.
* Behaviour regarding conversion of %20 in the playlist has been corrected.
* Window decorations can now be enabled in preferences.
* The translation templates have been simplified.
* Support for translating plugins has been re-added.
* The Jump-to-File code has been rewritten and now searches using 
  regular expressions. In addition, the search is done without GTK 
  queueing redraws for each entry, which has resulted in interface 
  speedups.
* The overall UI code has been reworked significantly and should be of 
  better quality. Notable enhancements include support for UIManager xml
  file declarations.
* A facility for searching and selecting/acting upon entries in the 
  playlist has been added.
* Support for multiple playlists has been added, and a playlist manager 
  has been added to manage them.
* Audacious now uses libmcs to store it's settings, which allows for 
  tighter desktop environment integration.
* Audacious now supports the XDG BASEDIR standard.
* A lot of XMMS and BMP code has been either removed or rewritten so 
  that it is less confusing. This should allow for easier maintainability 
  in the future.
* Debugging tools have been added for tracking memory allocation and freeing.
* A safe signaling implementation has been added.
* A voiceprint visualizer mode has been added.
* Support for changing the tint in the graphics of skins has been added.
* InputPlugins now use an InputPlayback context to track activity 
  instead of blindly pushing data down a potentially undefined pipeline.
* Audacious now uses GOption to parse the commandline.

Bugfixes
--------
* Too many to count.