Plait command-line jukebox News

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Release 1.5 introduces a web publishing feature which creates complete web sites with MP3 playlists, including an XSPF file, a web page that
embeds the XSPF Web Music Player, and MP3 files. Publishing is a two step process that involves running a Plait command and then uploading a directory to your server. Album cover art can optionally be looked up on Amazon.com. Also in this release, the robots.txt exclusion protocol is implemented when accessing the Shoutcast directory (Plait has always respected the Shoutcast terms of service).

Release 1.4 adds interactive mode, which allows you to vote yes or no on each track or stream in the playlist. By moving up one or two levels in the file hierarchy, you can also vote on albums or artists all at once. Some files have been relocated for better FHS compliance. A new sorting pattern was added, --group. The incremental directory caching code was modified to support renames and deletes. In plaiter, support was added for naming HTTP streams on the command line.

Several enhancements were made to plaiter, the front end to mpg123 et al: the --list option was added which displays the playlist; loop mode was added and the loop command which controls it; the latch command was added which ends playback after the current track; optional numeric arguments were added to the next and prev commands; the search command was improved; an rsearch command was added which searches backwards in the playlist; and an --enqueue synonym was added for the --queue option. Plait was extended with support for Beep Media Player and amaroK. Some code was cleaned up. The directory caching routine was modified to work with older versions of GNU find. Please note that support for amaroK has not been tested extensively.

Releases 1.1 and 1.2 potentially had permissions problems on Cygwin, depending on your configuration. This release addresses that problem. If you have been reverting to 1.0 because of permissions problems, this release is for you. It also includes minor feature enhancements: plaiter, the command-line front end to command-line music players, gets random shuffle, and plait adds support for symbolic links in the music directory, which allows you to create a wrapper directory with pointers to multiple other directories, including read-only volumes.

Release 1.2 introduces a playlist optimizer which enables several new features. Playlist balancing selects approximately equal numbers of cuts from each artist in a mix. You can also weight the balance by repeating hints. Patterns allow you to reorder the tracks in a playlist according to one of several patterns, including alternations, random alternations, and gaussian fades. Target devices allow you to select or prefer audio formats suitable for a particular device. There are three predefined target devices and you can define your own as well. This release also includes minor bug fixes.

Release 1.1.1 fixes two bugs in the code that supports iTunes on Cygwin, including one showstopper. Upgrading is highly recommended.

Release 1.1 adds support for iTunes on Cygwin. The Plaiter subproject gets a search-in-playlist feature and a status display.

Release 1.0 is the first stable release. It fixes a minor bug in plaiter, the command line front-end to command line music players, which resulted in a broken man page.

Release 0.99, the first beta, includes a new feature, pass-through commands like play, pause, and stop, and bug fixes, including to one serious bug that could cause "plaiter" to lose track of a still-running helper application in certain circumstances.

Release 0.55 introduces "plaiter," the command line front end to command line music players. Release 0.55.2 is a minor bug fix release.

Release 0.54 adds support for music players on Linux and (untested) BSD platforms. The players now supported are iTunes, Winamp, XMMS, mpg123, and mpg321.

Plait 0.53 was released today. This release adds support for complex queries against the Shoutcast station directory, including multiple hints, mixes, and the ability to exclude stations with the "not" keyword. This release also removes all dependencies on Bash. Plait will now run on any Bourne-compatible shell. Testing shows a 40% reduction in execution time when running the script with Ash on Cygwin versus Bash on Cygwin. Finally, this release standardizes on extended regular expressions, which makes it easier to type complex hints. No bugs were found since the last release.

Plait 0.52 was released today. This release introduces mix files, a new technique for categorizing your music. Mix files have some of the flexibility of play lists and some of the dynamic nature of playing tracks by genre. Release 0.52 also adds a more flexible syntax (you can mix hints and options freely on the command line), improved play list naming in iTunes, more robust error handling, and minor bug fixes.