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News in brief

By Chris Williams. Published: 10th Mar 2005, 16:30:23 | Permalink | Printable

New and updated software, hype and fun stuff

News in briefDave Higton has developed and released a USB radio driver for Iyonix and Castle USB users. You can download the software, which is compatible with the D-Link DRU-R100 radio, from Dave's website. Users can tune into stations by frequency or name and received audio is output to a 3.5mm jack on the USB radio gadget. Simtec USB users shouldn't feel left out, as a suitable driver has been available for a while now.

Some of the new features planned for Artworks 2.4 were revealed this week to users by MW Software. The new version is due for release in May for the Wakefield 2005 show, and will include enhanced bitmap export support and background blended text. The updated bitmap export will allow users to create bitmap graphics larger than available physical RAM, plus JPEG and CMYK sprite and TIFF export. The blended background feature for text will mean that the edges of text in a document can be blended into multi-coloured backgrounds. At the moment, Artworks will only blend text into a single background colour.

A new version of remote desktop administration app, VNC client ViNCe is out and includes scroll wheel mouse support. A 32bit compatible version of the Inform 6.30 text adventure game compiler has been released by Jon Ripley: You see ye olde FTP server, with example games and tutorials. Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH and ye Zip file URL. Also, family tree app GedText, Impression conversion utility DDF2HTML and image viewer SwiftJPEG have been tweaked and bug fixed.

For every 8bit and RISC OS 3 fan boy and girl out there, Liam Creighton has spotted this Acorn branded t-shirt on sale from tee-marto - very retro, apart from the price.

MyTunes alpha screenshotPaul Vigay and Andrew Flegg have each been working, albeit independently, on cloning Apple's iTunes for RISC OS: you can see a screenshot of Paul's efforts here (hype here) and Andrew's attempt here. We're assuming that the user interfaces are still very much work in progress, unless RISC OS 3.7 chic is suddenly the new black.

Finally, German RISC OS users will be pleased to know that a new online forum has opened at forum.acorn.de, after Arcsite's previous message board was closed.

Update at 00:06 11/03/2005
Andrew Flegg has uploaded an alpha version of MyTunes to his website - see comments.

Links

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Discussion

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The T shirt is the original early 80s logo, nice.

is a RISC OS UserIvanDobski on 10/3/05 4:49PM
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ViNCe is a VNC client surely, not a server?

is a RISC OS Userhubersn on 10/3/05 5:12PM
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Ye Zip file URL appeareth broken - there's a </br> in the middle!

is a RISC OS Userhutchies on 10/3/05 5:25PM
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I own that T-shirt. It's very nice indeed.

is a RISC OS Usermoss on 10/3/05 7:32PM
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finally an iTunes clone for RISC OS, maybe i'll buy that iyonix after all :-) lack of software like that caused me to abandon my RISC PC and buy an iMac

is a RISC OS Userleeshep on 10/3/05 9:06PM
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iYonix?

is a RISC OS Usermrchocky on 10/3/05 10:03PM
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An alpha version of MyTunes is now available. Far from feature-complete but certainly useful as a starting point (it plays music from a library either sequentially or randomly).

[link]

is a RISC OS UserJaffa on 10/3/05 10:29PM
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Jaffa - my MusicMan (see earlier drobe review) software outputs music files to a structured (by artist/album) !MyMusic directory. It sounds like what you're doing is complementary, so is there room for some compatibility? It'd be nice if some of these music apps worked together.

is a RISC OS Userarawnsley on 11/3/05 9:44AM
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arawnsley: Yep, certainly would be nice to have some tighter integration. With the alpha version available, users would have to manually drag the "!MyMusic" directory to the "Update library" window in !MyTunes.

But an interface so that third-party apps can update the music library, query currently playing tracks etc. would definitely be a good thing.

One thought which springs to mind is the number of blogs with an "I'm listening to..." field, which could be automatically set from !MyTunes [using whatever system they use to do that].

is a RISC OS UserJaffa on 11/3/05 9:56AM
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Jaffa - could you drop me an email to rcomp at rcomp.co.uk and I'll drop you a copy to play with etc.

is a RISC OS Userarawnsley on 11/3/05 10:42AM
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Ah! nice work all, and nice to see software writters working together ;@)

is a RISC OS Userem2ac on 11/3/05 10:46AM
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Agree. Nice to see you all working together.

is a RISC OS Usersa110 on 11/3/05 11:38AM
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If there was a chance of playing Ogg Vorbis files, then I could test these apps to their limit (I have over 12,000 tracks)!

:D whats the chances of Ogg playback support?

is a RISC OS Userem2ac on 11/3/05 12:06PM
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em2ac: possible; even inevitable eventually. Where it comes in the priority list, however, is up for debate ;-)

is a RISC OS UserJaffa on 11/3/05 12:16PM
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arawnsley

Any chance of MusicMan supporting a 'user named' !MyMusic directory?

My partner and I share music so calling a shared resource 'My' anything has always struck me as a little odd. Much of the music we own is our music and not mine nor hers :o)

is a RISC OS Userblahsnr on 11/3/05 1:24PM
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As a new user of Artworks, I'm glad to hear about the developments. Export of huge bitmaps is something which will be very useful to me.

is a RISC OS UserLoris on 11/3/05 2:22PM
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blahsnr - RO select/adjust's Choices structure should help - pop !MyMusic in the appropriate user's choices directory, or even user home, and there you go. If you don't have Select/adjust or a fileserver, you can make personal directories on your drive and pop !MyMusic in it - that way whichever user's "work" directory is viewed would be the active one. Changing them would just be a double click. Finally, you could rename the directories, and tweak the !Sprites files, as there's nothing too magical.

Erm. I've gone into too much detail for a message I think. Drop me an email if you want to know more.

is a RISC OS Userarawnsley on 11/3/05 5:59PM
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didn't Andre Timmermans release some beta Ogg Vorbis decoder for !DigitalCD a couple of years ago? i remember exchanging some emails with him on the subject since i was developing a hardware Vorbis decoder as part of my MSc... the common problem at that time was converting all the maths in the inverse MDCT to fixed point and there were many different versions floating around all based on pre-1.0 libvorbis. Now, there is the official 'tremor' integer-only codec which is available under a BSD-like software license, but I think !DigitalCD still uses Andre's own version.

is a RISC OS Usergovind on 11/3/05 6:05PM
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!DigitalCD does do Ogg Vorbis

is a RISC OS UserRevin Kevin on 11/3/05 6:09PM
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DigitalCD plays Oggs just fine. As does, if you bother to check drobe articles, my port of ogg123, which indeed uses Tremor.

is a RISC OS Usermrchocky on 11/3/05 6:11PM
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And it may or may not be worth mentioning that DigitalCD will happily play Ogg streams as well as just files.

is a RISC OS UserSimonC on 12/3/05 12:11AM
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v0.02 of MyTunes has just been released. No Ogg Vorbis yet, but numerous bug fixes and additional functionality.

Unfortunately, any existing libraries will need to be rebuilt; but there's now the option of using any ID3 tags to build up the list.

Its available to download from the above address and there's an updated screenshot at:

[link]

is a RISC OS UserJaffa on 12/3/05 7:34PM
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I've downloaded the latest version of !ROTunes (the Mr Vigay offering) and it looks nothing like the screenshots i've seen, in fact the scroll bars etc. are all over the place (maybe it doesn't like RISC OS Adjust) hope this gets fixed and we get a proper apple iTunes skin :-), but other than that its very fast and plays all my MP3's (about 2000 of them) fine. heres to hoping it gets fixed soon ;-)

is a RISC OS Userleeshep on 17/3/05 7:46PM
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ive tried RO Tunes, and it decodes MP3s with no trouble on my Red Squirrel 0.6 emulator with RISC OS 4. 2 on it, running on a 1.6 GHz Intel Dell laptop, emulating at 22 mips

is a RISC OS Userem2ac on 21/3/05 2:38PM
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