World’s Most Convoluted Audio Setup
Stephen B. - June 11th, 2007
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Archive for 2007 For the past two years, I’ve been using a cheap KVM switch to share a single set of devices (keyboard, mouse, and monitor) between my BeOS machine and my Windows PC. Due to the extra cost, I didn’t bother getting a KVM switch with audio support – and it seemed unnecessary at the time, as the majority of my audio playback needs were served by the BeOS machine. Over time, however, I began looking for a way to share my speakers between both machines. The answer: a rather convoluted setup that would make Rube Goldberg proud. Since many of our fellow BeOS users are probably in similar situations, I’ve written a description of the setup for anyone who might find the information useful or interesting. Read on for the details. Read More »
Remi Grumeau of HaikuNews has recently confirmed – via EMail correspondence with Frans van Nispen – that they are no longer developing software for BeOS-related platforms and have moved to OS X as their target platform. The future of Xentronix’s flagship product – the image editor Refraction – had already been in something of a state of limbo due to the discontinuation of ZETA (development of Refraction had been handed over to Magnussoft just under a year ago), but this is the first official confirmation from Xentronix. While we’re sorry to see him go, we wish Frans and company success with developing OS X software. The story has also been posted by IsComputerOn and BeGroovy.
Despite the apparent recent-inactivity of the site, we’ve been making a few changes behind the scenes. There have been the usual small tweaks and fixes – E.g., author names of news items are now EMail links, registration and login links have been added to the lefthand navigation (handy for frequent comment-posters), some requested links have been added, etc. One fairly significant new feature has been added: the News Aggregate page. It contains links to several BeOS / Haiku-related sites and their latest headlines (grabbed via RSS). I’ve been using a similar page to keep track of BeOS-related news – hopefully others will find it useful as well. If there are any requests to add (or remove) a feed, please contact us or post a comment. And one old feature has been added – for lack of a better description. After a few people had written in asking where to find articles from the old version of the site, I finally got around to finding a way to import the old articles into the current, shiny WordPress-powered version. WordPress has a handy option to import articles from the contents of an RSS feed (in a .xml file) – so while it’s not entirely perfect (images are missing, old comments weren’t imported either), the majority of the precious, precious content is is there. Even the horrible, horrible puns. Stay tuned for a few more tweaks and new additions – and maybe even a few news items (*gasp*).
Over on BeGroovy, Deej has posted a review of the Eagle Tech IMC6375, a small form-factor PC. As it’s BeGroovy, the review focuses on using the hardware with BeOS and Haiku – quoted from the introduction:
Deej goes on to describe a few issues that he ran into the with the hardware – he ended up using a cooling solution that’s amusingly familiar – but overall it sounds like quite a nice little piece of hardware, especially if you’re in the market for a compact PC capable of running BeOS. The review doesn’t go into details about performance – but based on the hardware specs, it’s pretty safe to assume that BeOS / Haiku absolutely fly on it.
Enough complaining about computer problems – back to the news! According to a recent post on the Haiku website, Axel Dörfler made some progress towards towards a CDDA FS (CD audio filesystem) driver. Marco Nelissen,of SoundPlay fame wrote the first implementation of CDDA-FS back in the R4.5 days, his work was later included in R5. In a nutshell, CDDA-FS lets you access the tracks on a mounted audio CD as if they standard WAV files – meaning that audio can be extracted from a CD by simply dragging-and-dropping, without the need for any separate “ripping” software. The Haiku implementation also comes with a small app called “cdda_text” for retrieving album and track name information. A screenshot of the driver in action has been posted as well. Correction: a reader wrote in to point out that the cdda_text app reads relevant info directly from the CD itself (if present), not from a remote CDDB database as I had written. Thanks to Oscar Lesta for the note.
Shortly after I posted a description of the hardware problems plaguing my personal desktop, our webserver decided to join the party and go offline with some hardware trouble. Apparently, there was a leaky internet pump – all the spilled bits have been cleaned off the server room floor and everything appears to be working properly again. If anyone is still having trouble seeing the site, try it with the address “new.beosnews.com” – we made some DNS changes during the weekend, they may not have fully updated/propagated yet.
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