[Rhythmbox-devel] Third-Party Plugin Updated: rbpitch

[Sean McNamara <smcnam gmail com>]

All,

After a several-month lag since the availability of a gtk3 version of
Rhythmbox, I'd like to announce that the rbpitch plugin, a third-party
plugin for changing pitch/tempo/speed on-the-fly, has been released.
The plugin is completely dependent upon the GNOME 3.x stack now, and
has no vestiges of GNOME 2.x support. It uses GSettings, GTK+ 3.0,
glib-2.28 or later, gstreamer-0.10, and of course libpeas-1.2. For
those still running Rhythmbox 0.13.x stable, you can download binaries
for older Ubuntu releases, or grab the source from bazaar and revert
to an earlier commit to get the 0.13.x code. Starting today, I will no
longer be maintaining rbpitch as it existed for GNOME 2.x; the GNOME
3.x / Rhythmbox 2.90.x based rbpitch is the way forward.

rbpitch is a fairly unique plugin (as far as I know), because it
satisfies three attributes that take advantage of the very latest
improvements to the GNOME stack (it was not possible to write a plugin
with this combination of features until very recently):

*Third-party, out-of-tree plugin that does not fork the whole
Rhythmbox source code;
*Uses autotools;
*Written in Vala.

The "written in Vala" part is particularly important: although it was
indeed possible to write a plugin in C satisfying the first two
conditions, Vala's improved integration with autotools; ability to
read .gir files and generate Vala bindings; and support for the GNOME
3.x platform are all new features to recent Vala releases.

No new user-visible features have been included in this release, but
considering the amount of code that had to change under the hood to
rework the build system and most of the GNOME API calls within the
source code, I'd say that it's a fairly great milestone for the
rbpitch project.

Homepage, which will link you to the source code, Ubuntu binaries,
end-user install instructions, and feedback forum on ubuntuforums.org:
http://launchpad.net/rbpitch

BTW Jonathan, two things: now that third-party plugin support is so
outstanding, I no longer feel a pressing need to ask for rbpitch to be
included in the main Rhythmbox tree. Now it is really easy to package
it up and ship a high-quality plugin as a standalone package in any
major distribution that's willing to consider it for inclusion. The
other thing is, great work on the GNOME 3.x support and the
out-of-tree plugin support! It's really shaped up so well.

Considering that none of this would be possible without a great amount
of effort in Rhythmbox itself, I honestly think that we are very close
to being ready for an actual stable release of Rhythmbox 3.0, based on
my testing and a general lack of bugs. But I found this hilarious
quote from Jonathan (completely tongue-in-cheek) that explains why
it's not yet ready ;-) :
[00:44:34] <moch> they're shipping a git snapshot, because there
aren't any releases past 0.13.something because I'm a bad person

In all seriousness, no you're not a bad person. :) But a release would
be awesome, whenever you feel it's ready.

Regards,

Sean