Ogg Frog Free Music Software Release Plans Announced
Ogg Frog's development has resumed after a long
pause.
Read about progress towards its release in
Rippit's Blog.
Rippit the Ogg Frog here. I owe you an apology. I promised Ogg Frog's 1.0 release for August 2006, then February 2007, and here it is August 2007 - a whole year later - and there is still no software for you to download.
I'm afraid some life events interrupted my work on the software for a long time. But I recently resumed work, and am now making steady progress. However, I'm not able to work on Ogg Frog full-time anymore, so it's going to be a while yet before I have a download for you.
To keep you informed of the progress I'm making, I'll be writing regular progress reports in Rippit's Blog.
Ogg Frog won't just be free as in free beer, but Free as in Freedom, published under the GNU General Public License with full source code to be provided.
Ogg Frog's download will be at this page, so bookmark it so you can come back for your download when it's ready.
I have some grand plans for my software, that will take a long time to implement. To keep you from having to wait so long, I'm going to release it in stages. Ogg Frog 1.0 will play music files and Internet radio, decode music files to WAV so you can burn any format I support with other software, and split cuesheets so you can burn them in players that don't support cuesheets.
Each time reaches a milestone of useful new features and has been thoroughly tested and debugged on all the supported platforms, I'll release it for a public testing from this page. Version 1.1 will add support for encoding and tagging several audio formats, for example. Ogg Frog 2.0 will support CD ripping, burning, backup, skins and integration with portable music players like the iPod, and natively support many different platforms and microprocessors.
That's right: Ogg Frog is a cross-platform application, because I'm building it from the ZooLib cross-platform application framework. Version 1.0 will support Windows, all versions of Mac OS X, with Universal Binaries for 10.4 users, Linux for PowerPC and x86, and BeOS for PowerPC and x86 as well as Haiku and BSD. 1.1 will also support the Classic Mac OS for PowerPC and 680x0 as well as the Solaris operating systems.
Contents
- Supported Music Formats
- Decode All Formats to WAV for Burning
- Cuesheet Splitter and Player
- Linux Packages, Debian Repositories and BSD Ports
- Don't Forget The Source Code!
- But Wait! There's More!
Supported Music Formats
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Ogg Frog will play Ogg Vorbis, native FLAC, Ogg FLAC, WAV, BIN and MP3 files. If you have QuickTime or if you compile the FAAD2 AAC decoding software using the source code and instructions I'll supply, you can also play AAC. You can play WMA tracks if you have Windows Media Player, the Windows Media Components for QuickTime, or compile the source code to FFmpeg. (I can't provide built-in support for AAC or WMA because they are patented. Unlike MP3 they have no free license for decoders. The fact that software patents prevent Free Software from supporting formats like MP3, AAC and WMA is the whole reason the unpatented Ogg Vorbis format was created.)
You'll be able to play Internet radio streams for all the supported formats. With the addition of FAAD2 you will be able to play AAC+ or HE-AAC streams.
Decode All Formats to WAV for Burning
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Ogg Frog will eventually be able to burn CDs, but not the 1.0 release. Version 1.0 will enable burning Ogg, FLAC and all the other supported formats in burners such as iTunes that don't support them by decoding music tracks to WAV files, which can be burned by any CD burner.
Cuesheet Splitter and Player
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Ogg Frog 1.0 will also support cuesheets or cue files. Cuesheets are text files that give the precise start and end locations of each track on a compact disc. Cuesheets allow you to make a bit-for-bit perfect backup of a CD, so that when you burn a copy, looking up the track titles at a CDDB database like freedb will work right. You may have been frustrated to find that if you copy a CD with iTunes, you can't download the track names for your copy with CDDB. That's because iTunes doesn't support cuesheets.
Version 1.0 won't be able to burn yet, but if you play a BIN/CUE file, or a FLAC and embedded or separate cuesheet, it will be as if you loaded a playlist of separate tracks. Any Ogg Frog playlist can include tracks from any cuesheet as well as individual tracks.
You'll be able to play individual tracks, cuesheets or folders full of tracks without having to enter them in a playlist as with iTunes or Rhythmbox. (Mrs. Frog's top complaint about iTunes is that she has to add tracks to her library before she can play them.) But Ogg Frog will have playlists as well, and can scan your hard disk to add all your music to its library.
Ogg Frog 1.0 will have a cuesheet splitter that will save the audio data from any cuesheet into a folder with a separate WAV file for each track. This will let you burn cuesheets in burners that don't support them
Linux Packages, Debian Repositories and BSD Ports
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Have you been frustrated to find that many Free and Open Source software projects don't provide packages for your distribution, so you have to compile from source? Even if you're able to build, installing from source breaks your box's packaging system, so you're not able to cleanly upgrade or uninstall.
Not with Ogg Frog! Rippit believes in serving the interests of his users, and that means giving you native-built packages for your distribution.
Ogg Frog 1.0 will support the i386 and PowerPC instruction set architectures. 1.1 will add support for 680x0. Each subsequent release will add support for more CPU types.
Planned for the 1.0 release will be RPMs for Fedora Core, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Yellow Dog Linux, and Mandriva Linux.
Debian packages will be provided both by debian repositories as well as web page download of .deb files that you can install with dpkg -i. Debs will be provided for Debian Sarge, Ubuntu and AGNULA. Instructions for adding Ogg Frog's repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list will be provided when the Alpha test is released.
Possibly I will enable automated Gentoo source code builds as well.
BSD ports for FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD will be provided in source and binary form. I'll also provide web page downloads of the BSD packages.
Don't Forget The Source Code!
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The source code will be provided in a bzipped tar file, a source RPM, debsrc package and BSD port for easy building with your distribution's packaging system.
When Classic Mac OS support is added in version 1.1, there will also be a Stuffit source archive to preserve the file type and creator code HFS filesystem attributes.
But Wait! There's More!
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I have a couple top-secret features coming that I expect will make Ogg Frog a huge hit, but I won't say what they are until the Alpha test is available for download.
-- Rippit the Ogg Frog rippit@oggfrog.com
What the Bold Print Giveth, the Fine Print Taketh Away
Copyright © 2005 Michael D. Crawford.
Ogg Frog, Rippit, Rippit the Ogg Frog, the Frog logo and the Circle Flowers logo are trademarks of Michael D. Crawford. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
So there.