Today LeechCraft 0.5.75 “This Glorious Nightmare” is released!
Just like in the previous release, we mostly focused on LMP module, which is our collection-oriented music player.
For example, it now supports music collection uploading to portable media players. Files can also be set to converted from lossless formats like FLACs to lossy but much smaller ones (in terms of file size) like Ogg Vorbis. One can also select the desired directory layout and file naming when uploading files. The transcoder is highly parallel: in fact, it can encode as much media files as you have CPU cores, so it makes sense to upload music in big batches. It’s also run with minimum possible priority, so one can just continue to do your work while the media files are being converted. All this stuff looks like this:
For now only those media players are supported that don’t require any special MTP or i-device-related protocols, but support for the latter ones is planned. By the way we will be glad to get your help here — from writing protocols support and synchronization modules to testing!
Among other significant new features in LMP:
- Support for social radio stations like Last.FM radio.
- Obtaining personalized recommendations, recent releases by artists in user’s library and biography retrieval.
- Support for MPRIS.
Implementing collection synchronization support required us to make yet one more plugin: Vrooby. Vrooby is responsible for working with the underlying platform/backend to obtain information about removable storage devices. Other plugins then may query it to know what devices are available and where they are mounted, for example. It also allows the user to mount and unmount them via LeechCraft UI:
Several things were optimized a lot, thanks to the Intel VTune profiler being for non-commercial use (it’s available in Gentoo’s science overlay, BTW). Particularly, startup times were reduced a lot (especially if all the required libraries are already in disk cache), and some places like contact list drawing in Azoth, our IM client, were optimized.
We’ve also worked hard on a couple of new plugins, one of which is Monocle, a modular document reader. It would be officially announced next time in milestone 0.5.80, though, so stay tuned!
There was a bunch of minor fixes and enhancements in other plugins, so check out our development digests, where all this is listed in more detail: #25, #26 and #27. One can especially highlight two small but highly requested features:
- First, a nickname can be inserted into current chat tab message edit by Ctrl+clicking it in the roster.
- Second, Azoth ChatHistory module finally got a small calendar widget to select dates to view history for, and links in chat logs are now clickable.
Packages and builds for supported distros and OSes will be available soon. Watch your package manager or our download page! By the way, the source archive is already available.