History
The short story
Version 0.1 was released back in 2008. It quickly arose both glorifying and criticism. - And that was fair depending on the viewpoint. pMusic 1 was extremely hungry on CPU-power, but it also showed some fresh capabilities of Gtkdialog. The pushing of limits has continued, and it has become a showcase of features I didn't realize was possible using Bash/Gtkdialog.
While pMusic 2 basically put more flesh to the bone, the 3. generation shipped the homemade internal dynamic db. That was very ambitious - maybe too ambitious. So the arguing flamed up again. Cpu-usage was now reduced to the half, but the db had become active and working on its own grabbing music information while playing. New valid arguments had come to the battle...
pMusic 4 focused on all the goodies Thunor gave us with his outstanding work on Gtkdialog. With all kinds of new features the dynamic db became even more active, and it showed its bottlenecks and weaknesses. - The criticism to it was still fair. The last year of pMusic 4, most effort went to stabilize the db-usage. It has become clearer to me why Amarok, Clementine and friends use an external db like Mysql or Mariadb. But when focus is on size and dependencies, that was never an option.
pMusic 4 became stable, but of course for a price. Introducing routines for queuing db pulls and continuously checking db status slowed down the general usage of the audioplayer. If it should fit the mantra of Puppy, it should work snappy also on older pc's. As mentioned, pMusic-code has been written since 2008, and I have learned some bits and pieces since then. There had to be a potential benefit of rewriting the code. The result is seen in pMusic 5, and it has become noticeable faster. - That means a lot faster. The cpu-usage has decreased, but more important; many functions are much more responsive. An overall snappier user-experience.
- The complete evolving is documented in the changelog.
- Some older releases are found in the archive
Resource-hunger
| Version | Year | CPU usage | Memory usage | Code uncompressed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pMusic 0.1 | 2008 | 50.9 % | 26 Mb | 110 kb |
| pMusic 1.8.3 | 2011 | 16.2 % | 34 Mb | 330 kb |
| pMusic 2.6.7 | 2012 | 18.6 % | 28 Mb | 500 kb |
| pMusic 3.3.0 | 2013 | 18.6 % | 28 Mb | 480 kb |
| pMusic 4.7.4 | 2016 | 14.9 % | 29 Mb | 680 kb |
| pMusic 5.2.4 | 2016 | 12.1 % | 29 Mb | 600 kb |
- The test-machine is an AsusEEE netbook 1001px (cpu:2x1.66Ghz atom). This is a low-powered netbook that makes it easier to measure the differences in cpu-usage.
- The task is to play a mp3 file. The app is started at least twice to ensure no first-run operation misleads the test-result.
Screenshots
Version 5.2.0 - 2016
Version 2.1.0 - 2011
Version 0.1.0 - 2008
Categories
CategoryMultimediaCategorySoftware
