Native WavPack support in Android, patches awaiting approval from Google Options

[bryant]

Peter McQuillan has again outdone himself by providing a set of patches for Android that provides native decoding of WavPack files. The support even includes handling correction files (which I believe is the first time on a portable device)! It uses the 4.60.1 version of the WavPack library without source code modification.

Of course, this has not been accepted by the Android folks yet. It would obviously be a great coup for WavPack to be in Android and anyone interested in helping this along should “star” the issue request on the Google Android site (you don’t have to add a comment unless you want to):

WavPack on Android issue request

Links to the patches are in the request if anyone wants to try them out now.

Thanks so much to Peter for all his hard work and Scott for posting the initial request!

edit: haha, could some kind moderator please fix my spelling error in the thread title?

This post has been edited by bryant: Jan 14 2010, 06:28

[Canar]

I'm more than a little frustrated by Google's position that Android is a fork of Linux, rather than working on having their modifications accepted into the mainline kernel. But that's largely irrelevant here.

You have my star. WavPack for the win!

This post has been edited by Canar: Feb 9 2010, 15:57

[rpp3po]

Google does not have that position. Their code was dropped from mainline by a maintainer not working for Google. He criticized a lack of effort from Google's side to get it accepted, as you write. The other side of the story is, that there may also be a lack of willingness to accept very reasonable changes on the side of the kernel maintainers. Google employs the best programmers of the world, they are not known for trying to force half-baked, vendor-centric changes into OSS projects. They are also not known as forkers, but rank along the biggest contributors to OSS worldwide.

Lets see what happens. If the future shows that one side still can profit from the other, changes will merge again. This is all pretty low level, anyway. Higher level interfaces and APIs are not affected by this, just specific types of drivers.

There are some insightful comments in this Slashdot discussion.

This post has been edited by rpp3po: Feb 9 2010, 17:01