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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: Fwd: Kaboodle
From:       Neil Stevens <multivac () fcmail ! com>
Date:       2001-03-29 21:37:30
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On Thursday 29 March 2001 01:16 am, Stephan Kulow wrote:
 > I don't see the reason why we should have a media player and a
 > lightwight media player.

OK, here's the long version of why Noatun and Kaboodle are different apps:

The relationship between Noatun and Kaboodle is much like that between
KWord and KWrite, or Pixie and KView.  Superficially they seem to do the 
same thing, but the two apps are designed to be used in different ways.

Noatun is a good music player: It's set up to have you load all your 
files in a playlist, turn on some effects or not, and just let it run 
all the time.  Noatun works really well in one's session, because once 
you load a playlist, you don't ever have to load it again.  It can just 
run and run and run.

If I run noatun as a music player, and have my hand-tuned playlist all
set, I won't want to use noatun for clicking on files in KMail or
Konqueror.  It'll mess up my playlist.  That's a tradeoff.

I had thought about this for some time, but it wasn't until Kaiman was
gone that it became more than a theoretical concern.  I saw two 
solutions: one is to have noatun work in two modes.  The other is to 
just make a separate app out of the new mode.

Someone who only uses media files in one way may not need both Noatun 
and Kaboodle.  One or the other will suffice.  But playing background 
music is a task quite different viewing a movie.  mpeglib might not be 
ready for this until after KDE 2.2, but eventually Kaboodle is going to 
be able to play videos just like aKtion does - with the video embedded.

OK, that's one argument, and that was my primary motivation for writing
Kaboodle.  However, several other advantages have fallen out.  First, it 
became obvious that making a KPart plugin out of Kaboodle would be very 
useful.  Nikolas did it, and it seems to me he did a good job of it.

Second, I've had people tell me that while Noatun (and arts) uses more 
cpu time than they would like, Kaboodle's cpu use is "like xmms."  I 
think this is because of all the aRts infrastructure that Noatun sets 
up, in order for the effects, visualizers, and volume control to be 
possible.  If the difference between Noatun's and Kaboodle's cpu load 
while playing is that big a deal to people on low-end machines, it seems 
to me that it can only be beneficial to include both.

Even Charles thinks that Kaboodle would be better for associating with 
WAV files than Noatun, and he thinks Noatun can do everything.  :-)

-- 
Neil Stevens
multivac@fcmail.com
neil@qualityassistant.com

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