Hi! Rippit the Ogg Frog here.

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It took me over six months from the time I announced plans to develop Ogg Frog until I actually started coding it. I wasn't just being lazy: I was completely stymied as to how to even begin.

I have quite grand plans for my Free Software product; for example I plan to support ripping and encoding to several formats and bit rates simultaneously, so you can, for example, make FLACs to listen to on your computer at the same time as you encode Ogg Vorbis files for your portable player.

At the same time, I am unsatisfied with the user interfaces of most available audio software. But to provide powerful, configurable features while at the same time presenting an easy to use, intuitive user interface presents a difficult problem, and I was completely flummoxed.

Finally one day, while Mrs. Frog was visiting a friend at another pond, I decided to Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work. Excited, I called Mrs. Frog to tell her my plan: I would start by making Ogg Frog play an Ogg, with only the barest user interface required to select a track.

When I set into coding, I discovered I must solve another problem first: how to do speaker output with Mac OS X Core Audio.

Click the Full Story link for the code.

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Hi Friends! Rippit here.

While I don't plan to release Ogg Frog until I feel it is of production quality, I am giving in to popular demand by releasing portions of the source code that I'm happy with.

I do plan to open up the Ogg Frog development to others at the time of the 1.0 release: the series of diaries I publish over the next couple weeks will eventually become the Ogg Frog programmer's guide.

In today's diary, I discuss Ogg Frog's ZPCMQueue class. It is a First-In First-Out (or FIFO) buffer for decoded PCM data that is implemented as a two-ended circular buffer: the file format decoding thread fills it from one end, while the speaker output thread empties it from the other. You can get the source here:

• Ogg Frog Source Code (Just ZPCMQueue for today)

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I expect to release Ogg Frog 1.0 for public Alpha test on Saturday, August 12. The exact date depends on how my job hunt goes, as when I start my hoped-for new job I won't be able to work on Ogg Frog as intensively.

Ogg Frog will be released in increments, with each 0.1 release representing a new feature set and platform support milestone. Ogg Frog 2.0 will be a player, ripper, encoder and backup program as promised on the website, as well as integrating with portable players like the iPod. I expect it to take at least six months to reach 2.0.

Ogg Frog 1.0 will be a music file and Internet radio player, decoder, and cuesheet player and splitter. Binaries will be provided for Windows, all versions of Mac OS X with Universal Binaries for 10.4, BeOS for both PowerPC and x86 as well as Haiku, seven linux distributions and three BSD distributions, again for both PowerPC and x86. Full details can be found in:

• Ogg Frog Free Music Software Release Plans Announced

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If you offer your music under a Creative Commons or similar license, I can host Bit Torrent downloads for you, absolutely free of charge, in a variety of formats: Ogg Vorbis, MP3, AAC and the compact disc-quality FLAC.

I'll even do all the work of ripping, encoding and tagging your music. All you have to do is send me your music on a CD via snail mail, according to the instructions given at:

• Get Your Music Torrents Hosted at Ogg Frog

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I wrote the following page to answer a very important question, but I don't feel I did a very good job writing. Maybe you can help?

• Why Ogg Frog?

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I just created a Technorati Profile. Posting this link here then completing Technorati's blog claim process allows it to confirm that Rippit at Technorati and Rippit the Ogg Frog at K5 are indeed the same frog.

In other news, I fulfilled my promise in my previous diary to buy an ad.

Poll: Technorati: Good or Whack?

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I've just finished the first in a planned series of Digital Music How-To Articles:

• Why Can't I Play the CDs That I Burn?

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... but I think now I should have stayed home at least another day. I did get some good work done while I was there, but I left early. Now I'm sitting at home feeling paralyzed. What I should be doing is getting packed to fly to Newfoundland tomorrow night, what I am doing is hanging out online doing nothing in particular, and will likely stay up all night.

I have a real hard time waking up if I haven't had enough sleep, but I don't have a hard time just staying up. It's just that if I do it too much all my screws loosen.

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I thought it would be cool to host Creative Commons-licensed music at my new website, so I now offer to you:

• Ogg Frog Free Music Torrents

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