# The &noatun; Handbook

Charles
Samuels

    charles@kde.org

2001
Charles Samuels
&FDLNotice
13/02/2001
0.10.3

&noatun; is a fully-featured plugin-based media player for &kde;.

KDE
Noatun
kdemultimedia
mp3
music
media

## Introduction

&noatun; is a fully-featured plugin-based media player for KDE.

### Features

By default, &noatun; supports the MP3 format, MPEG-1 video and Wav. Other formats can be easily installed as plugins. As of this writing, there are plugins for OpenDivx. OggVorbis is also supported if the libraries were availible during the compilation of mpeglib. See the mpeglib for other plugins.

## Using &noatun;

&noatun;, by default, starts with the Excellent user interface plugin. This plugin was chosen since it bears the most similarity to other &kde; applications.

&noatun; is unique in that no two installations are the same, and there is no standard interface, although there is a default one.

## Using &noatun; Plugins

You can select different plugins by going to the Settings menu, and selecting Configure Noatun. Move to the Plugins by selecting the appropriate list item. Then drag, or move the items with the arrow buttons. Enabled plugins are on the upper list, while disabled plugins are on the bottom list.

### Milk Chocolate

Milk Chocolate is a small, simple User Interface. The buttons behave mostly like a CD-player, and the eject button opens the playlist. The sheet with a cross button removes the current playlist item, but does not delete the file from disk, and the arrow button sets the looping mode. A menu is available by &RMB; clicking anywhere in the window.

### Young Hickory

Young hickory is a plugin for the &kde; System Tray, the area near the clock, by default.

&RMB; clicking on the icon will show a small menu, and &LMB; clicking will toggle the visibility of your &noatun; user-interface windows. Note that playlists, for example, are not considered user-interfaces.

### ID3 Reader

The ID3 reader will read the ID3 tag information from MP3 files, and set the song titles in the format you've requested. The ID3 tag loader page in the Noatun preferences window will allow you to modify the format. Enter the format string in the first textbox, and a preview will appear on the second.

You can also modify the ID3 tags of the files from the Plugins menu, ID3 Editor

### HTML Playlist Export

This plugin will place your playlist in a nice HTML table. Its preferences page will allow you to set colors, background image, and enable the Hover mode, for changing colors when the cursor is over a link.

After setting options, the Player menu's Playlist Export will open a file dialog for you to select where to save the output.

### KJofol Skins

The &noatun; KJofol skin loader is a partial reimplementation of a &Windows; under the same name.

&noatun;'s implementation has a few limitations, unfortunately. The skins must be `PNG` based, and uncompressed on disk.

To install a skin, (in the Windows ZIP format), follow these commands:

    % cd $KDEHOME/share/apps/noatun
    % mkdir skins (if needed)
    % cd skins
    % mkdir new_skin ; cd new_skin
    % unzip /path/to/new_skin.zip

If the images aren't PNG based, you can easily convert them with the following script, after changing to the skin's directory. Replace `bmp` with the another image format if needed.

    % for i in *.bmp ; do convert $i `echo $i | sed s/bmp$/png/`; done; rm *.bmp
    % cat skin.rc | sed s/\.bmp/\.png/g > temp ; mv temp skin.rc

You can also make your own skins with the tutorial at http://www.angelfire.com/mo/nequiem/tutorial.html. &noatun;'s implementation does not have support for the Dock/Windowshade mode, and the seeker cannot be a bar.

## Questions, Answers, and Tips

### Frequently asked questions

The music skips a lot when moving windows.

Have &arts; buffer more by starting the &kcontrol;, and moving to the Sound group, and Soundserver section, and increasing the response time. 348ms is usually sufficient for most computers. You may also consider running the soundserver with real-time priority if setting the response time doesn't help. Be aware that this can cause your system to lock-up.

The Plugins menu empty.

Not every plugin puts an item in there. The ID3 plugin does, for editing the currently playing file's ID3 tag.

I can't remove a playlist or user-interface from the plugins list

Since &noatun; requires at least one user-interface loaded, and exactly one playlist, you have to add a new user-interface plugin before removing the old one. Adding a new playlist will automatically remove the old one.

Where can I get more plugins?

Third-party developers can submit their own plugins to the &noatun; web-site, where they can be downloaded by you, the users.

How do I write a &noatun; plugin?

Documentation, an API reference, and example source code is available at the &noatun; web-site. Also, in the spirit of Open Source software, the source code to &noatun;, and all default plugins is available.

## Credits and Licenses

Program copyright 2000-2001 Charles Samuels charles@kde.org

Documentation copyright 2001 Charles Samuels charles@kde.org

&noatun; has been brought to you by the following people:

- Charles Samuels charles@kde.org

- Neil Stevens multivac@fcmail.com

- Stefan Westerfeld stefan@space.twc.de

- Martin Vogt mvogt@rhrk.uni-kl.de

- Malte Starostik malte.starostik@t-online.de

- Nikolas Zimmermann wildfox@kde.org

- Stefan Schimanski 1Stein@gmx.de

&underFDL; &underBSDLicense;

## Installation

### How to obtain &noatun;

&noatun; is included with all &kde; releases after 2.1.

### Requirements

&noatun; requires at least a Pentium 200 with &Linux;, a PowerPC with &Linux; 2.4.1 or later, or several other platforms. Support for more platforms will be available in later versions.

For a platform to be supported easily, it must have pthread support, and the OSS sound output system, however ALSA is supported under &Linux;.

### Compilation and Installation

Compiling &noatun; is very easy. The following should do it:

    % ./configure
    % make
    % make install

That should do it! Should you run into any problems, please report them to the author at charles@kde.org.

If you have this documentation, you've probably already compiled &noatun;