Sorry for the delays everyone. I think my host (savannah.gnu.org) finally got their act together and fixed most of their hosting problems. That was a month ago. It took me that long to get up off my butt and then figure out how to use their new distribution system (which is, by the way, worse).

So 1.0 is out. I haven't been too concerned about releasing it (sorry) because I was busy petting my deprived picture collection. (I settled on using the php-based gallery software on sourceforge). I haven't finished sorting my pictures by a long shot, but at least I've got it better than it was before.

But back to the subject: Squash 1.0 primarily represents an adequate port to the empeg. It's not perfect (the most annoying thing to me is that getting to the next song takes about 0.5-1.0 seconds), but it's the best that can be done for right now.

I do plan on giving Squash my attention again eventually, but I'm not sure exactly when. I will be effectively rewritting it, not completely, but I will at least be ripping the guts out and replacing the threads with something else -- the threads right now are my biggest gripe, programmatically speaking.

For those that don't know, and I should have probably put this at the beginning of the post, Squash is a replacement player. The most important differences is the support of OGG, MP3 -and- FLAC. Also, an easy to use and open database format can be used to store both the meta information (such as artist names) and also for storing play preferences.

That brings me the biggest thing about Squash, the player is fully automatic. That is, Squash will monitor your playing habits and pick songs for you. You don't have to do anything except skip songs you don't like. You -can- even rate them manually if you are so inclined (though, I'd probably advise you do so ahead of time, not while the song is playing).

Automatically picking songs is Squash's neatest feature, but also (at the moment) it's biggest liability. Right now, there is -no- way to pick a particular song or even group of songs you'd like to play (actually you could hack something out through the hijack menus, but you'd be a lunatic). These features are inheirently secondary on the list of things to do for me because of the nature of Squash.

But I will be adding them, I just couldn't do it for the 1.0 release.

Anyway, I hope things are found to be relatively stable. I have had the program lock up very occasionally, but I have never had any corruption of the disk or anything of that sort (some have been ansy about the fact that squash runs in rw-mode, in order to save your listening preference).

So check it out:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/squash/

I haven't uploaded all the files I used to have on savannah, but at the moment (at least), they are available here (1.0 is not here):

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/savannah/files/squash

I tried to upload a notice to this effect to my official area, but it's been constantly failing to oblige me.

Anyway, as always, a long-winded post by yours truely:

Adam Luter (Gryn)

Take Care!