Panflute is the new black Music Applet.
Let me explain.
Panflute is slated to be the successor to Music Applet. Its fundamental architectural change is the complete separation of the part that draws the panel applet from the part that figures out how to talk to the backend music player. By “complete”, I mean that Panflute makes them entirely separate programs. This opens the possibility of other software also using the Panflute backend instead of figuring out its own way to talk to a dozen different music players. A panel applet is just one possibility — you might want a desklet, or whatever GNOME 3.0 will replace panel applets with, or an alarm clock, or something else I can’t even think of.
The goal of the Panflute backend is to make everything look like it has a nice, clean MPRIS interface. MPRIS is great because it specifies a common interface for programs to talk to music players. MPRIS isn’t so great because many popular players (such as Rhythmbox and Banshee) don’t use it, and many players that do implement it either deviate from the spec in some areas (such as Audacious) or have some odd quirks about their interpretation of the spec (such as Amarok). The Panflute backend papers over all these issues, presenting a single, common, consistent interface, regardless of what player is actually running. It also adds some (clearly marked) extensions to MPRIS to provide features not available in MPRIS 1.0, such as setting metadata (particularly ratings) for the current song, or having a convenient way to get updated position information without having to resort to polling.
Panflute also provides a panel applet to replace the old Music Applet. At this time not much has changed feature-wise, but by doing a ground-up reimplementation, I’ve been able to throw out a bunch of legacy code to work with now-fairly-old libraries and to redesign things to support more flexible layout of the applet’s content, such as the oft-requested support for fat panels.
Perhaps most importantly, however, is the fact that I’m using Launchpad to host development of Panflute instead of doing things directly off of kuliniewicz.org. This means I’ve now done something I should’ve done a long time ago and started using a proper bug tracker instead of relying on e-mail. Finally.
The plan for now is to get Panflute up to feature-parity with the most recent release of Music Applet and make that a 0.something release. The 1.0 release will try to include as many feature requests from Music Applet as I can manage, as well as a testing tool to help verify that the code that handles talking to each music player works as expected, and to map out what functionality isn’t available. (Hey, that’s another thing that can exploit the applet/backend separation!) The 1.0 release should also make sure those player support modules implement as much of the MPRIS spec as possible; so far I’ve been focusing on the /Player object (which the applet makes heavy use of) and largely ignoring the /TrackList object (which it ignores completely). Obviously, for the Panflute backend to be generally useful for other developers, it needs to be full-featured.
I really ought to formalize the above paragraph a bit and get a proper blueprint for future development up in Launchpad….
Anyway, the Panflute code hosted on Launchpad is functional, with all applet features except pop-up notifications implemented and backend support for Rhythmbox, Banshee, Amarok, Audacious, Muine, and VLC implemented. There’s still some rough edges, particularly how the applet doesn’t yet bother to start the backend process, but those issues will be easy enough to fix. (And now that there’s an actual bug tracker, you can file a bug if something is amiss and/or missing.)
