There are a number of things worth mentioning about MAD of late.

First, I have set up a SourceForge project which I plan to use for the public forums, bug manager, support manager, and patch manager, as well as to mirror the distributions. I may also use it for the task manager, although this is less clear to me at the moment.

You are welcome to continue submitting patches on this mailing list, although you might prefer to post them on SourceForge instead (and follow-up with a note here) since there is no public archive for this list.

I may also set up CVS on SourceForge at some point, if people are interested.

The SourceForge project page is:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mad/

In other news, I have made some rather drastic changes to MAD which I plan to release soon as 0.12.0b. These changes include:

Throughout: - use of automake - use of libtool (to simplify building shared libraries)

libmad: - extended the timer API, making it very useful - the async API is almost finished - extended the decoder API to enable (fast) header decoding and an opportunity to preempt decoding the rest of the frame - numerous other API changes

madplay: - support for long-style options - support for internationalization (via GNU gettext) - support for start/stop playing in the middle of a file - support for shuffle/repeat - modularized filter framework - new fade-in filter to start with (fade-out, inter-song gap, and cross-fade handling planned)

Besides finishing up the above, I'm also currently trying to decide how best to deal with mpg123 compatibility. This is important because it will allow MAD to be used as the back-end decoder for many existing front-end GUIs.

Tom Lawler has contributed a modified version of madplay that will emulate mpg123 output, enough to provide minimal functionality to work with gqmpeg. This apparently all runs quite well on the iPaq. :-)

His package can be found here:

ftp://handhelds.org/pub/apps/sound/

I'd like to incorporate something like this into the primary distribution, but I would like to do a more complete emulation, including support for all or most of mpg123's command-line options. Unfortunately, I think to do this right will cause the size of madplay to bloat too much, so I'm considering making this a separate program ("mad123") that just uses the MAD library.

Is there anyone interested in working on this? I can do it, but I'd rather spend time finishing other things...

Also speaking of sub-projects, since the next release of MAD will be internationalized, would anyone here with non-English speaking skills like to contribute translation(s)?

Finally, since I've been working largely on the above, I haven't had a chance to incorporate some of the more recent patches, particularly Andre's imdct_s and requantization optimizations. I haven't rejected them, but they will probably have to wait until 0.12.1b.

That's all for now.

Cheers, -rob