DisOrder Change History

This file documents recent user-visible changes to DisOrder.

Changes up to version 5.0

Server

The device configuration option now works under OS X. Devices may be specified either by UID or name. Fixes Issue 27.

Gapless play should be more reliable, and playback latency over RTP should be a bit lower. Note though that all the sound output code has been reorganized and in some cases completely rewritten, so it's possible that bugs may have been (re-)introduced. Decoding of scratches is also initiated ahead of time, giving more reliable playback.

The command backend now (optionally) sends silence instead of suspending writes when a pause occurs or no track is playing.

If libsamplerate is available at build time then that will be used instead of invoking SoX. SoX support will be removed in a future version.

Playlists are now supported. These allow a collection of tracks to be prepared offline and played as a unit.

Disobedience

Multiple tracks can now be dragged in the queue in a single operation. Furthermore, it is now possible to drag tracks from the “Recent”, “Added” and “Choose” tabs to the queue.

Disobedience now supports playlist editing and has a compact mode, available from the Control menu.

Disobedience has a new manual.

Web Interface

Confirmation URLs should be cleaner (and in particular not end with punctuation). (Please see README.upgrades for more about this.)

RTP Player

There is a new --command option which allows the RTP player to send audio data to a user-chosen command instead of an audio API. See the man page for details.

The --device option to disorder-playrtp now works under OS X (as above).

General

IPv6 should now work. Network address specifications (listen, connect etc) can now be prefixed with -4 or -6 to force use of IPv4 or IPv6, though normally this should not be needed.

Unicode support has been upgraded to Unicode 5.1.0.

Various elements of the source code have been rationalized.

Bugs fixed

ID Description
#22 Background decoders interact badly with server reload
#27 Mac DisOrder uses wrong sound device
#30 mini disobedience interface
#32 Excessively verbose log chatter on shutdown
#33 (Some) plugins need -lm.
#39 Double bind() non-multicast AF_INET
#40 Missing stub function
#41 Missing includes for timeval
#42 syntax error in empeg_host section
#43 decoder segfault with FLAC 1.2.1
#44 gcc 4.3.2-1ubuntu12 SUYB patch
#45 disobedience doesn't configure its back end
#46 Sort search results in web interface
#48 build-time dependency on oggdec removed
#49 Disobedience's 'When' column gets out of date
(none) “found track in no collection” messages for scratches are now suppressed
(none) Disobedience would sometimes fail to notice when a track started, leading to its display getting out of date.

Changes up to version 4.3

Disobedience

A bug was fixed in the calculation of how much of the track had played. This would lead to the counter showing incorrect values in various situations.

Disobedience's icons have been changed to larger, more colorful ones. The SVG source is included if you want to fiddle with them.

“Select all” is now no longer available in the choose tab. Instead there is a new “Select children” option which selects the file children of a single subdirectory.

Server

The selection bias for newly added tracks was reduced by half. You can put it back to the old very neophilic value with “new_bias 900000” in the config file.

It is now possible to ‘adopt’ randomly picked tracks. Disobedience and the command-line client support this but the web interface does not.

The default track name parsing was modified to handle filenames generated by iTunes.

Miscellaneous

disorderfm now preserves directory permissions.

DisOrder is now licensed under GPL v3. The main goal is to prohibit Tivoization.

The build system will now automatically cope with Fink's broken GTK+ packages. There are a number of improvements to the Debian packaging.

DisOrder now builds on 64-bit Linux systems.

There are various minor fixes.

Bugs fixed

ID Description
#24 Fails to build on ubuntu 8.10
#26 Disobedience shows wrong track elapsed time after a pause

Changes up to version 4.2

Disobedience

The login window now has a 'remote' switch. If this is turned off then Disobedience will connect to a local server. Formerly it would always use TCP/IP.

The Delete and backspace keys will now remove tracks from the queue. Escape will now dismiss the properties, users or login windows and return now works in the login and properties windows.

Documentation

Track and global preferences are now described in a new disorder_preferences(5) man page.

Bugs fixed

ID Description
#21 CGI should use PATH_INFO more sensibly

Changes up to version 4.1.1

Disobedience's “Login” window now works when you are logged in.

Changes up to version 4.1

Disobedience

Disobedience has been largely rewritten:

Disobedience attempts to cope with servers from older versions, up to a point, but this is not well tested and it's best to keep the server fully up to date.

Server

When a track shares a directory with its alias, the real track name is now returned instead of the alias (the opposite way round to the previous behaviour).

Changes up to version 4.0.2

Corrected web browser linked from Disobedience.

Changes up to version 4.0.1

Libtool and Automake now install the CGI correctly. As part of this, cgidir has been renamed to cgiexecdir. The configure script will report an error if you try to use the old name.

Changes up to version 4.0

Server

The gap directive will no longer work. It could be restored if there is real demand.

Event Scheduling

It is now possible to schedule events to occur in the future. Currently the supported actions are playing a specific track, and changing a global preference (thus allowing e.g. random play to be turned on or off). See the schedule-* commands described in disorder(1).

Random Track Choice

This has been completely rewritten to support new features:

  • tracks in the recently-played list or in the queue are no longer eligible for random choice.
  • there is a new weight track preference allowing for non-uniform track selection. See disorder(1) for details.
  • there is a new configuration item replay_min defining the minimum time before a played track can be picked at random. The default is 8 hours (which matches the earlier behaviour).
  • recently added tracks are biased up; see new_bias and new_bias_age in disorder_config(5).

Web Interface

This has been largely rewritten. The most immediate benefits are:

  • the search page is integrated into the choose page, and includes links to parent directories.
  • if you try to do something you have insufficient rights for, instead of getting an error page or nothing happening, you are redirected to the login page.

Customizers should find their lives easier: the syntax is less onerous, it is possible to define macros to avoid repetition, and the documentation is less monolithic (see disorder.cgi(8) as a starting point).

Mail is now sent via the system sendmail program, though it remains possible to use TCP to connect to an SMTP server. See sendmail and smtp_server in disorder_config(5).

The web interface is now installed automatically. If you don't want it, use ./configure --without-cgi. If you want it in a non-default location, or no location for it is detected, set cgidir and httpdir on the ./configure command line.

Disobedience

There is now a new user management window. From here you can add and remove users or modify their settings.

Relatedly, the server will only allow remote user management if you set remote_userman to yes.

Miscellaneous

scripts/setup now honors command line options, and can set up network play as well as the local default sound device.

Bugs Fixed

ID Description
#2 Search results should link to directories
#6 Schedule tracks for a particular time
#10 Non-uniform track selection
#11 Bias random selection to newly added tracks
#13 Default encoding for debian setup scripts
#16 Cookie expiry causes user to be silently logged out and not subsequently redirected to login page
#20 Broken aliasing rules

Changes up to version 3.0.2

Builds --without-server should work again.

The web interface is a bit more liberal in the cookie value syntax it will accept.

Clients fail more gracefully if no password is available.

Changes up to version 3.0.1

Debian upgrades from 2.0.x should now work better.

Changes up to version 3.0

Important! See README.upgrades when upgrading.

Platforms And Installation

Mac OS X and FreeBSD are somewhat supported. There is now a bash script in scripts/setup which will automate the setup after make install.

Server

Users are now stored in the database rather than a configuration file.

The server now has a built-in list of stopwords and players, so only additions to these need be mentioned in the configuration file.

The default inter-track gap is now 0s.

How sound is played is now controlled via the new api configuration command. This also controls how the volume is set, which now works with ALSA as well as OSS.

A bug in the MP3 decoder was fixed (also in 2.0.4).

Web Interface

The web interface now uses cookies to remember user identity, and allows online registration of new users. Also it is no longer necessary to manually specify the URL of the web interface (but you can override it if you don't like the value it figures out).

It is possible to allow users to register via the web interface.

The web interface's browser support has been improved. It has been tested with Firefox 2, Safari 3, Konqueror 3, Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9.

Disobedience

A bug which would cause a crash if you attempt to rearrange the queue while no track was playing has been fixed. There is a new 'deselect all tracks' option, mirroring 'select all tracks.