Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Website: https://gogglesmm.dev/
If you don’t know what GogglesMM is, see our review this issue.
I asked Sander for an interview and he very kindly accepted to answer my questions.
Q: How did you get involved with programming, and why a music player?
A I'm a software engineer currently working for Baron Weather (https://www.baronweather.com). I grew up in Europe and currently reside in the United States. In previous jobs, I used to do a lot of C/C++ work (UI, Visualization), hence why gogglesmm is written in C++. The UI library (www.fox-toolkit.org) gogglesmm uses was the same one we used at work. But nowadays I tend to program mostly in Python, so there's a lot less overlap with work and hobby.
At the time, I wasn't running the fastest computer or with the most memory. Even though there were plenty of music players available, there wasn't one with a library manager that was both lightweight and easy to use that suited my needs. You had either `easy and take all my system ram`, or `lightweight and no functionality`. I was trying to get to a happy medium. Especially in the early days I did a lot of optimization to make sure everything ran super smooth without taxing the system too much. Another goal was to make sure the player wouldn't `touch` my files without my explicit permission. I definitely encountered Photo and Music managers in the past that would start automatically moving/renaming files.
Q: Who would you imagine is GogglesMM user base (mostly?), and why did you decide on open source?
A I don't know how accurate these are, but my impression is either a) users running on older hardware and b) audiophile users who simply want `passthrough` playback without having to worry about sample/rate conversions.
Open Source is simply a no brainer. My goal was never to make any money off this, but simply to write a player I'm happy to use myself. By making it open source, the hope was that others would find it useful as well.
Q: What would you say to users coming from other music managers? And would GogglesMM be the right one to start with and why?
A I certainly hope that people will give it a try. I'm sure it won't be the be-all and end-all of music players, but it has a good feature set and performance.
Q: What do you think of the current trends in music managers?
A Now with dozens of streaming services available, the days of music managers in my mind are over and I suppose more of a niche, similar to people that still like to play records. As phones have taken over as primary portable playback devices, it's much less work to set up a Spotify than to transfer your music collection to your phone.
Q: Can you describe your personal music playing setup?
A It highly depends on where I am. When I'm at work, gogglesmm is usually running in the background. At home, I have a mini-pc attached to my home-entertainment system which also runs gogglesmm. In other situations when I'm out and about, I usually use my phone for playback (GoneMAD Music Player, although not written by me, I highly recommend). Another tool I have written is Audioconvert. It allows me to easily `sync` my music in different formats depending on the target platform. So, for my work laptop and phone, I have my music in the Opus format. At home, it's in the original FLAC format. Occasionally I have a copy in MP3 format to playback over my car stereo from USB drive.
Q: The GogglesMM web page is a little sparse; would you accept help in getting it more modern?
A I'd call it functional. At the end of the day, it's just a web page. I'm not sure how many people really look at a web page before installing a piece of software. I tend to find software through the package manager myself. That said, as it is an open source project, I'd value any contribution.
Q: What would your advice be for our budding open source developers?
A I'd consider open-source a hobby, so, first, work on something you need yourself. That's the best motivation to keep working on it.
Q: Where to from here? Any surprises waiting in the wings? Any projects we should be aware of?
A There are a couple features implemented and pending a release when I find the time and motivation. Most notably an optional cross-fader that would work well when playing random music. I'm also a bit behind on the ubuntu packages, and need to update these for the latest ubuntu releases. Some translation updates as well.
Q: What is the best part of writing GogglesMM, what did you learn?
A Being able to listen to your own music collection in your own player! A few years ago, I replaced the xine backend (http://xine.sourceforge.net/) with my own playback engine. That ended up being a lot of fun, and I learned a lot about multi-threading and the various file formats. The best part is hearing back from people who happen to stumble upon my player.
Q: What would be the “killer feature” if you had time and money to implement it?
A Not sure… Windows support? That should get me a large user base, right? All kidding aside, the code is written in a portable way, and at some point I had something partial running under Windows (VMware, very slow). This is more of a lack of motivation issue (I have no need for it myself), but it would certainly be interesting to make it work.
Many thanks to Sander for taking the time to answer our questions.