Whamb Audio Player Shares Via Rendezvous

Stéphane Thiell writes, "I just released an update of Whamb, a little shareware CD/MP3/OGG player for Mac OS X 10.2. It's not as advanced as iTunes, though it now has playlists sharing using Rendezvous. A friend even wrote a tool in Perl which allows to run playlists server on POSIX systems." Nifty. It's still in development, but works pretty well. I've got the Perl daemon running too, with some local modifications. The Rendezvous support has some scalability issues with my 25GB of MP3s, which maybe why iTunes still doesn't have it ...

My Quick review

[pi radians]

Well, I just d/led this and I can't say I'll too impressed. It's cpu-usage is just a little under iTunes (avg. 6% to iTunes avg. 9% on my MDD 867). The rendezvous thing I'm sure is cool, but I have no way of testing it out. It plays the same files iTunes does. And skinning is pointless because I prefer to use synergy [wincent.org] for iTunes.

No offence to the author of this app, but I don't see why anyone is trying to charge people money for such an application ($12.50 USD in this case) for a replacement of an excellent tool Apple gives away for free.

Re:My Quick review

[Erasei]

I think the whole selling point of this app is the Rendezvous support. So your review is like someone revewing a flying car and comparing its ground-driving to that of a Lincoln town car. Of course the town car is going to be better on the ground, but town cars can't fly.. and neither can iTunes. I am not flaming.. just, uh, providing a counter-viewpoint :)

Posting this from a 650 iBook, I can say that if it will play the same tunes, and save 30% of resources over iTunes, I might actually go download this. I run iTunes hidden almost always, so looks aren't important. Free the resources, skip the GUI. MHO.

Re:My Quick review

[pi radians]

Oh, I totally agree. But as I understand it the next version of iTunes will support Rendezvous.

To each his own though.

How'd Steve do it?

[rf600r]

Remember the MacWorld show where Mr Jobs showed of Rendevous? I seem to recall him getting all cranked up about Rendevous letting you share iTunes playlists and such.

How did HE do it?

Re:How'd Steve do it?

[insensitive_clod]

Hmm... Maybe he got his hands on a leaked copy of an iTunes 4 beta from a Hotline server! Wait, no...

Nice.

[thatguywhoiam]

I think you beat Apple by.. 4 days. Heh.

Still, it's got OGG, so good on ya.

Re:Nice.

[pudge]

Yeah, we'll see how iTunes does it, when it is released, if it is released. And maybe it will give Whamb some ideas of how to improve its support. And yeah, there's the Ogg. :-)

Re:Nice.

[applematters]

its just a matter of time before Apple incorporates this into itunes.

hooray!

[krel]

i've two macs, one with all my mp3s, and another with an airport card, and an eyetv box connected to one fine mofo of a sound system (ok, decent sound system). Now i can keep my eyetv stuff on the local hard drive, and stream my mp3s off the other machine.
though i would still like to see this in itunes, *dream*, there's always macworld expo
-krel

install

[Refrag]

Unfortunately, the installation procedure isn't drag & drop. I pretty much expect that in any application I'd be willing to pay for. It could be done easily with Whamb as far as I can see. If they really want to store the skins in the ~/Library they should do that on first run. Personally, I think they should store them in the application package.

Interesting

[0x0d0a]

This gave me an idea.

The primary problem in systems like Freenet is a reliable way of obtaining an index of all the information available. e.g. *this* SHAsum is *this* mp3.

What if players could share playlists, which contained SHAsums of each file (or series of chunks in the file, whatever). This data is lightweight, and free and clear to distribute. Fine to put on an out-in-the-open sharing mechanism. Then the actual audio files are shared via Freenet, looked up using the SHAsums.

Second, there's a great quote from the article:

The protocol used here (WHSP), similar to HTTP for requests, and using XML data for responses, is light and efficient.

I didn't think I'd ever see "XML" and "light and efficient" in the same sentence.

Re:Interesting

[mbusoft]

For XML (users list and playlists responses), Whamb uses CoreFoundation's API, which has an option for binary property lists. It's about 2-4 times smaller than plain XML. WSD uses plain XML tho, but it's not really a problem on a local network anyway. Mac OS X has a great support for plist/XML (all apps use it), it's so useful and efficient for trees and complex data... maybe you need to review your opinion about it :-)

For the scalling problem, I just discovered it's a limitation to CFStream's API (can't send more than about 256K of binary XML). It's gonna be modified in 1.1.1 to use a less specialized way but without any limitation, until this is fixed in CoreFoundation...