Audacious partial repair, but still defective

[scruffyeagle]

With the so-called "upgrade" to the kernel 3, one of the valuable programs which bit the dust was the program "Audacious". The biggest gripe of most users, was that the WinAmp-style interface no longer worked. The "upgrade" version lacked the "scale" function, to make the display expand to take up more of the screen. Without "scale", the display was incredibly tiny, and unusable. This traumatized many users, who'd settled on Audacious as being the very best of the many players. (Myself included) The main trouble, was that the developer of Audacious had lost all interest in the program. After much griping from the community at large, the original developer spent one evening (as per info he posted) working on Audacious, getting the "scale" functional again. The result was Audacious version 3.7.2. I now have a copy of that on my system, after it was loaded into the Debian v9.5 repo.

The "scale" function in Audacious v3.7.3 now seems to work perfectly. The appearance is now that of the program I came to love so much. However, its playlist manager is still defective. I'm grateful that he was willing to do as much as he did - but, the repair work isn't finished.

* In the Linux kernel2 version of Audacious, the playlist manager was able to read the contents of the v.2 MP3 tags, and display it in the playlist window. It was wonderful, as an accessory to music practice sessions playing along with the recordings. I was able to edit the tags & put in text values up to 256(?) characters long - much longer than could be display could show. BUT, the Linux kernel3 version is screwed up. Defective. It seems to sometimes show the v.1 MP3 tags, and sometimes show the filename from disk. I haven't been able to pick out any set pattern, for which defect will be the result for any given file.

* I discovered a 2nd defect in the playlist manager this evening: When I saved a playlist to disk, the contents of the playlist had been trimmed down to nothing more than the filenames of the songs. Luckily, I was able to recover the one playlist I'd saved, via a backup copy in a backup directory. But, I learned my lesson - NEVER save a playlist using the Audacious v3 playlist manager.

Luckily, I still have a copy of a kernel2 version of Audacious in a very old Ubuntu v10.04 installation. However, the repo is long gone. God forbid it ever crashes, or I'll lose use of a vital program.

If I had programming skills, I'd probably dig into this repair on my own. Then, I'd try to share it into the repo under a new name; probably, something like "Audaciously", so people would know what it was. But, I don't, so I can't. (My skills are in music, art, & social sciences.) I can only hope that some wonderful person with programming expertise (maybe the original developer?) will read this, & find themselves motivated, to repair Audacious.

[stevepusser]

Have you tried a backported version of Audacious 3.10 to see if that fixes the bugs?

https://build.opensuse.org/package/show ... /audacious

[scruffyeagle]

Have you tried a backported version of Audacious 3.10 to see if that fixes the bugs?

https://build.opensuse.org/package/show ... /audacious

I'm now unsure of whether I properly understand the term "backport". I'd thought it was taking a new version, and tweaking it to fit on an older OS. You seem to be suggesting trying to use an old version, that's been tweaked to work on a newer OS.
?

No version of Audacious released after the Linux kernel 3 smacked the Linux world, works properly. And yes, I've tried them. Let me repeat: After kernel 3 whapped the world, Audacious suffered an extreme disfunction of sizing on the screen. (The "scale" function wasn't working.) On high res screens like mine (1440x900), the displayed player was approx. 2 inches wide x 1 inch tall. Unusably tiny. That was eventually fixed in the v.3.7.2 in Debian v9.5 - but, it has major disfunctions in its reading & writing of MP3 v2 tags. It can't use them, like kernel 2 versions did. Version 2.3, which I still have a working copy of in my Ubuntu v10.04 installation, works great. Yes, VERY rare crashes (3x in 5 years?) - but, still better than anything else available.

[milomak]

Have you tried a backported version of Audacious 3.10 to see if that fixes the bugs?

https://build.opensuse.org/package/show ... /audacious

I'm now unsure of whether I properly understand the term "backport". I'd thought it was taking a new version, and tweaking it to fit on an older OS. You seem to be suggesting trying to use an old version, that's been tweaked to work on a newer OS.
?

it seems you have your versioning understanding wrong

how is v3.7 newer than v3.10?

[stevepusser]

Have you tried a backported version of Audacious 3.10 to see if that fixes the bugs?

https://build.opensuse.org/package/show ... /audacious

I'm now unsure of whether I properly understand the term "backport". I'd thought it was taking a new version, and tweaking it to fit on an older OS. You seem to be suggesting trying to use an old version, that's been tweaked to work on a newer OS.
?

it seems you have your versioning understanding wrong

how is v3.7 newer than v3.10?

That's beyond me...doing the OP's google-fu for them:

https://packages.debian.org/search?keyw ... ection=all

https://repology.org/metapackage/audacious/versions

Backports are rebuilt from the original source code with maybe some tweaks to be compatible, not just "adjusted", whatever that means.

[milomak]

it occurs to me that the op probably believes v3.7 is actually v3.70. and that v3.7 should be expressed as v3.07.

[stevepusser]

it occurs to me that the op probably believes v3.7 is actually v3.70. and that v3.7 should be expressed as v3.07.

Reality is a harsh mistress.

[scruffyeagle]

Have you tried a backported version of Audacious 3.10 to see if that fixes the bugs?

https://build.opensuse.org/package/show ... /audacious

I'm now unsure of whether I properly understand the term "backport". I'd thought it was taking a new version, and tweaking it to fit on an older OS. You seem to be suggesting trying to use an old version, that's been tweaked to work on a newer OS.
?

it seems you have your versioning understanding wrong

how is v3.7 newer than v3.10?

How could v3.7 NOT be newer than v3.1??? Normally, the decimal points express updates, like .1, .2, .3, .etc., with the number increasing with each update. 3.0 would have been 3rd major release unmodified. v3.1 is the 1st modification on the 3rd release. Followed by v3.2, v3.3, v3.4, mod, mod, mod, till it eventually reaches 3.7.

Just answer this: Is the "backport" new software modified to fit old systems, or old software modified to fit new systems?

[roseway]

There seems to be some misunderstanding about version numbers. They're not decimal numbers, they're dot-separated items. So version 3.10 means major version 3, minor version 10. This is newer than 3.7, which is major version 3, minor version 7.

[scruffyeagle]

There seems to be some misunderstanding about version numbers. They're not decimal numbers, they're dot-separated items. So version 3.10 means major version 3, minor version 10. This is newer than 3.7, which is major version 3, minor version 7.

Ahhhh....!!! Yes, I used to know that. My bad!
Dah,... Thank you for the wonderfully clear explanation.

I did a little basic homework, reading the Wikipedia page about "backports". I'm feeling much better now, thank you for your tolerance.

I looked at the page at https://build.opensuse.org/package/show ... /audacious. That's for OpenSUSE, right? But, it's safe for Debian v9.5?

And, I'll need to set up a user account, for doing the dl'?

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I looked at the page at https://build.opensuse.org/package/show ... /audacious. That's for OpenSUSE, right? But, it's safe for Debian v9.5?

And, I'll need to set up a user account, for doing the dl'?

They are Debian packages and are "safe" to use in a stable system, no user account is required.

[stevepusser]

You don't need a user account to add the repo and the repo key per the instructions. That's the way to do it, IMO, because Audacious is actually made up of several different packages, and you'll see an update notice when I find the time to update it to 3.10.1.

There is a link to "grab binary package directly", but that just gets the audacious deb and not the rest of the packages that it depends on, such as audacious-plugins.

You also don't need a user account to directly download source files and debs from my multimedia OBS repo, you just need to click a couple of the right links there in order to get into the repo itself in a browser. The repo does have hundreds of packages now, though.