News

Mesk 0.3.2 - Dead Edge of Town

Time for a Mesk release with some useful queue features, bug fixes and more! If you are using Mesk, and I don’t already know you (friends and correspondents) send me a shout, I’d like to get a feel for how many of you there are.

  • New features:
    • New playlist keybindings ‘Q’ and menuitem for adding tracks to the front of the playlist queue.
    • New playlist keybinding Alt+q for clearing the queue.
    • Album covers fetched from amazon are now cached
    • Better notification using “busy cursor” during large playlist adds
    • Gentoo ebuild uses ‘mp3′ instead of the ‘mad’ USE flag.
  • Bugs fixes:
    • Relative paths in playlist URIs now work.
    • Gajim status plugin talks directly with the Gajim DBus service rather than through the shell which fixes the problem encoding ‘♫’
    • Playlist name is exported correctly.
    • Prefer the latest python version installed instead of the minimal version
    • Fix configure options and ebuild USE flags.

Downloads:
tarball - http://mesk.nicfit.net/releases/mesk-0.3.2.tgz
ebuild - http://mesk.nicfit.net/releases/gentoo/mesk-0.3.2.ebuild

Now Playing: Mogwai - Travel Is Dangerous

12 July 2007

Mesk 0.3.1 - Stoner Jam

This bug fix should help people trying to run Mesk 0.3 on Ubuntu Feisty.

  • Bugs fixes since 0.3.0:
    • Fixed process renaming bug. Removed since it never really worked and was not portable.
  • New features since 0.3.0:
    • Lyrics plugin that will load a Google search in a web browser.
    • Better filtering and selection of album art search results.
    • Added Swedish (sv) translation, by Daniel Nylander

Downloads:
tarball - http://mesk.nicfit.net/releases/mesk-0.3.1.tgz
ebuild - http://mesk.nicfit.net/releases/gentoo/mesk-0.3.1.ebuild

Mesk in Swedish:
Mesk using Swedish language translation

Now Playing: Modest Mouse - Cowboy Dan

7 May 2007

Mesk 0.3.0 - Blood On The Wall

Changes since 0.2.x

  • DBus service and interface for remote control (e.g. to bind to multimedia keys)
  • CD audio support.
  • System tray icon (requires Gtk+ 2.10)
  • Playlists can now be exported to any of the supported playlist types.
  • Support for read-only playlists and annotations (i.e. comments).
  • More feedback for potentially long operations via status bar.
  • Improved startup time for large/many playlists.
  • Refactored plugin API to ease writing plugins and the ability to add menu items to the View menu.
  • XSPF (Spiff) playlists used as internal playlist format.
  • PLS playlist support.
  • Jump to current (Ctrl+j) is now in the View menu and will display the playlist tab if necessary.
  • Toggle compact UI mode with Alt+c
  • Many playlist errors which resulted in a dialog are now reported in a message window that can be opened by clicking on the status bar image.
  • A new log window (View->Logs) for viewing logs when not started from the command line.

Plugin changes since 0.2.x

  • Download album covers from amazon.com with the albumart plugin.
  • Gajim status plugin allows customization of the format through the preference dialog.
  • Last.FM status and stats shown in plugin configuration dialog and home page link added to view menu.

Top 10 bands rocked during Mesk 0.3.0 development:

  1. Blood On The Wall
  2. Modest Mouse
  3. Melvins
  4. Tragedy
  5. Meat Puppets
  6. The Giraffes
  7. The Sword
  8. Hot Snakes
  9. Film School
  10. The Roots

Now Playing: Mr. Bungle - Quote Unquote

20 April 2007


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Features

    Audio:

    • Formats supported: mp3, ogg vorbis. (Thanks to GStreamer, other formats may work but are not yet officially supported.)
    • The basics: play, pause, stop, next, and previous audio tracks.
    • CD audio support for all your CD drives. Album information is fetched from freeDB.
    • HTTP support, including basic authentication.

    Playlists:

    • Supported playlist formats: XSPF (spiff) (the default), M3U, PLS.
    • Support for multiple playlists with the ability to cut/copy/paste between them.
    • Individual tracks can be queued, or reordered with drag-and-drop.
    • Files can be added using drag-and-drop from other applications (e.g., file manager or web browser links).
    • Playlists can be searched; press CTRL+F or '/'
    • Playlist modes shuffle and repeat.
    • Playlists can be set read-only.
    • Playlist state is automatically saved.
    • Playlists can be exported to any of the supported formats.

    User Interface:

    • System tray icon with menu support for most major audio operations.
    • The application and UI can be controlled remotely from the command line or other applications using the per-session DBus interface.
    • Album cover art and song information for the currently playing track is displayed.
    • The user interface supports both normal and compact mode.

    Plugins:

    • The audioscrobbler plugin will submit the songs you play to last.fm enabling charts and statistics like this.
    • For users of the Jabber/XMPP client Gajim, the gajimstatus plugin will update your IM status with the currently playing song information.
    • The albumart plugin will download missing album covers from Amazon.com

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Screenshots

Mesk
Preferences

Compact Mode
Search

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Download

Current release is 0.3.2 (requires GStreamer 0.10.x):
Gzipped tar archive | ebuild

Previous release is 0.2.1 (requires GStreamer 0.8.x):
Gzipped tar archive | ebuild | Ubuntu (Dapper)

The development repository can be accessed using subversion:

Stable branch: http://svn.nicfit.net/svn/mesk/branches/0.3
Development trunk: http://svn.nicfit.net/svn/mesk/trunk 
 $ svn co --username anonymous --password '' http://svn.nicfit.net/svn/mesk/trunk mesk-trunk
 $ cd mesk-trunk
 $ ./autogen.sh
 $ make
 $ make install