[mad-dev] libmad everywhere

[Rob Leslie]

Hi Sam,

> First off I think libmad is awesome, a great bit of code.
> I have just finished integrating libmad into Kaffe, the open
> source java VM.  Now any java app can call codec functions which
> will use the lowlevel libmad C libraries to do the hard work and
> pass back raw PCM.
> This was done as part of the pocketlinux.com project so we now have
> lightning fast mp3 decoding on iPaq and other handhelds.

Excellent. Is this available online somewhere? I took a quick look at
pocketlinux.com but didn't know where to find it.

> I found the code so easy to use I was wondering why there aren't
> more players out there based on mad.  Is there even an XMMS
> plugin?  I will write one if there isn't.  Seems like most of the
> players out there simply cut and paste code from mpg123 of simply
> fork it of as another process.  I really like the idea of having
> a simple lib on the system for doing mp3 decoding and having all
> the players link against it.

I think somebody was going to write an XMMS plug-in but I don't know whether
any progress was made. If anyone has, surely they will speak up.  :-)

It would be nice to develop a versatile API and shared library suitable for
multiple applications. The current library is OK although perhaps a bit plain.
In particular I think it would be helpful to have more API layers, so another
layer might handle all the buffering associated with reading from a stream,
and another layer could scale the output to any of a variety of formats
(8/16/24/32-bit PCM, floating point, etc.) and so on.

This list is a good place to talk about such things.

Cheers,
  -rob