I've been working with the guys at Slimdevices to get Musepack support for the Squeezebox, and it's finally all come together. I've written Perl modules (that'll eventually be in CPAN) that read APE tags as well as the header information in an MPC file, and that information is passed back to the Slimserver for cataloguing.

Playback issues have been resolved temporarily by compiling our own version of the Musepack decoder, which will now simply terminate decoding when a write error is encountered (instead of issuing an error and retrying every few seconds). I know that this has been fixed in v.1.96, but I don't know when this will be released, or how I might get a copy of the fixed code (Christian, you might be able to help me out here.)

The question we have is with respect to the binary distribution of mppdec. We'd love to host the re-compiled mppdec.exe program at Slimdevices, as well as distribute it with the Slimserver application (we're trying to move towards distributing all of the tested decoders with the server software to minimize configuration issues). We don't know what the licensing issues are, tho, for distributing the binaries. Can someone tell me what sort of license mppdec has, and/or what the new copyright is (Frank mentioned that it changed with v.1.96)?

Many thanks,
C

mppdec 1.1 was released under the LGPL. By it's rules, you can host the modified binary and distribute it. And if someone asks for the modified sources, you must make them available somehow. Having it downloadable at Slimdevices server would do.

I couldn't find anywhere - inside the sources package or at Klemm's home page - the license governing mppdec 1.95e (the version I found at Case's site). Therefore, that code is simply ©Frank Klemm and can't be distributed or modified without written permission by the author.

Hmmm...I'm definitely not using 1.1, so I'll assume that I need to get Frank to approve the Slimdevices distribution of our modified v.1.95e...I'll send him a private message shortly.

Probably best to contact him via Christian. The two of them have a line of communication and Frank is notoriously difficult to get hold of, as he doesn't really use web boards. He's Old Skool

In my experience, he doesn't tend to respond to private messages.

We are working with Christian (and Frank) to put the sources in the CoreCodec CVS. We have the 1.15r sources up already and there is also a 1.95e decoder in there that we need to merge in the SV7 module. But very soon all sources (encoder/decoder) will be available to anyone. No need to worry anymore (and all in LGPL).

As robux4 was pointing out already, we should soon have all the sources uploaded to the corecodec CVS, and all will be marked with proper licenses.

About mppdec.exe, how would you guys think about a DLL doing the same ?

A DLL is perfect.

I'm available to work on stuff now, too. Will setup wincvs tonight.

As of May 6th, Musepack support is included in the nightly builds of the Slimserver software...so, Squeezebox now officially supports Musepack! Thanks for all the help, guys...

nice! i read up on the squeezebox, too. looks like it has managed to harness OSS well

i hope your adoption and work will spur on some more musepack adoption


thanx

Great stuff! MPC adoption may be slow but hopefully things like this well help push it along.

Excellent! I think I may have to buy a Squeezbox now.

Great work! Now we have mp3, flac, aac, vorbis, shorten, wma, wav, apple lossless and mpc. Does anyone want to tackle monkey's audio?

--jth

The slimserver actually transcodes all these formats to mp3 for streaming to the squeezebox, right?

No, the squeezebox supports raw PCM and mp3 audio. You can choose whether to decode these formats to raw or transcode to mp3 for playback.

--jth