TagLib 1.5 Release

TagLib 1.5 is out.  A rundown of major changes, as well as the source,
is available at:

http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html

There's a Mac OS framework linked at the bottom of the page.  I'll post
Windows binaries as soon as Lukáš has a chance to build them.

As always, file any bug reports that you happen to run into in the bug
tracker.  As there are specifically a couple things that I intend to
implement (wav / aiff support as well as support for ID3v2 tags in RIFF
chunks) I expect a 1.5.1 (or 1.6) to be much faster in coming around
this time.

I'd like to give a special thanks to Lukáš Lalinský for the numerous bug
fixes, testing and new features, Urs Fleisch, Aaron VonderHaar for their
ID3v2 frame implementations and of course Michael Pyne for helping keep
the bug list in check.

Cheers,

-Scott
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[Lukáš Lalinský]

Hi all,

On Št, 2008-02-21 at 03:13 +0100, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> TagLib 1.5 is out.  A rundown of major changes, as well as the source,
> is available at:
>
> http://developer.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html
>
> There's a Mac OS framework linked at the bottom of the page.  I'll post
> Windows binaries as soon as Lukáš has a chance to build them.

Sorry for the delay, busy week... :(

Windows binaries for MinGW and MSVC are on:

http://ftp.musicbrainz.org/pub/musicbrainz/users/luks/taglib/

Building a custom version with different compilers or compiler settings
is quite simple with CMake. If anybody there are any problems with it,
just post them to the list and I'll try to help.

> As always, file any bug reports that you happen to run into in the bug
> tracker.  As there are specifically a couple things that I intend to
> implement (wav / aiff support as well as support for ID3v2 tags in RIFF
> chunks) I expect a 1.5.1 (or 1.6) to be much faster in coming around
> this time.

Now that 1.5 is out and I already had one person asking me to sync
taglib.ext with 1.5/SVN, I was wondering whether you would be ok with
adding the MP4 and ASF code from there to SVN. I know you didn't want
that for possible legal and other issues, but, honestly, the code is
already being used various applications and I've never heard of any
problems from them. Having all the code in a central repository would
make it much easier for me to maintain.

Lukas



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Lukáš Lalinský wrote:

> Now that 1.5 is out and I already had one person asking me to sync
> taglib.ext with 1.5/SVN, I was wondering whether you would be ok with
> adding the MP4 and ASF code from there to SVN. I know you didn't want
> that for possible legal and other issues

Can't speak for asf, but I can vouch that at least for fedora, legal
reviewed mp4, and determined that the mp4 container isn't encumbered, and
that metadata parsing, manipulation is kosher (outside of actual decoding).
This is how many distros include libmp4v2.

-- Rex

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Rex Dieter wrote:
> Can't speak for asf, but I can vouch that at least for fedora, legal
> reviewed mp4, and determined that the mp4 container isn't encumbered, and
> that metadata parsing, manipulation is kosher (outside of actual decoding).
> This is how many distros include libmp4v2.
>  

Hi Rex --

What would it take to get them to do a quick review on ASF?  It would be
wonderful if it were possible to get an answer from them on that.

Per Lucas's comments -- my worries aren't so much that MS or Apple is
going to come after us personally.  If anything, they'd probably just
send a cease and desist letter if they cared.  I'm more worried about
TagLib being not included in distributions if it moves over into legal
gray area.

-Scott
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Scott Wheeler wrote:

> Rex Dieter wrote:
>> Can't speak for asf, but I can vouch that at least for fedora, legal
>> reviewed mp4, and determined that the mp4 container isn't encumbered, and
>> that metadata parsing, manipulation is kosher (outside of actual
>> decoding). This is how many distros include libmp4v2.

> What would it take to get them to do a quick review on ASF?  It would be
> wonderful if it were possible to get an answer from them on that.

Sure, I'll see what I can do.
 
> I'm more worried about TagLib being not included in distributions if
> it moves over into legal gray area.

In the meantime, maybe just make the asf support optional (default =
disabled), so distros/end-users can choose for themselves to take the risk
or not?

-- Rex


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Rex Dieter wrote:

> Scott Wheeler wrote:

>> What would it take to get them to do a quick review on ASF?  It would be
>> wonderful if it were possible to get an answer from them on that.
>
> Sure, I'll see what I can do.

query sent.  

In the meantime, my own quick-n-dirty searching turned up
http://www.advogato.org/article/101.html
which, by my own untrained non-lawyer eye seems to imply that treading on
asf territory is troubled waters.

-- Rex

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[Lukáš Lalinský]

On Po, 2008-02-25 at 14:45 +0100, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> Per Lucas's comments -- my worries aren't so much that MS or Apple is
> going to come after us personally.  If anything, they'd probably just
> send a cease and desist letter if they cared.  I'm more worried about
> TagLib being not included in distributions if it moves over into legal
> gray area.

The thing is that they already do distribute it. For example they don't
seem to mind to have it as part of Amarok. Specifically Fedora even used
to have a back-ported patch, not just vanilla source tarball, to fix the
ASF support in Amarok. My problem is that the same code is used also in
other applications, which again distributions don't mind to package, but
the problem with these "mini-forks" is that I find a bug it's much
easier to fix in TagLib, which fixes it for all of them, than to fix it
in my source tree and ping the authors to update their packages.

Anyway, I think a build-time option to disable these formats should take
care of any issues.

Lukas



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Lukáš Lalinský wrote:
> The thing is that they already do distribute it. For example they don't
> seem to mind to have it as part of Amarok. Specifically Fedora even used
> to have a back-ported patch, not just vanilla source tarball, to fix the
> ASF support in Amarok.
Why didn't they send it to us to fix upstream?  :-(

> My problem is that the same code is used also in
> other applications, which again distributions don't mind to package, but
> the problem with these "mini-forks" is that I find a bug it's much
> easier to fix in TagLib, which fixes it for all of them, than to fix it
> in my source tree and ping the authors to update their packages.
>
> Anyway, I think a build-time option to disable these formats should take
> care of any issues.
>  
Yes, please, please do.  I didn't even know, for instance, that there
was an ASF branch alive and kicking somewhere until recently, at which
point I updated the code in Amarok but ran into issues because at one
point we, or upstream, had called it WMA instead.  Plus we now had to
add a bunch of configure checks in against Taglib 1.5 because some of
the formats are now supported directly in Taglib so we had to remove our
support to avoid duplicate symbols if Taglib 1.5 was on the system.

Point being, it would simplify things greatly to have all of the work
done in one tree and disabled by default, but simply enabled by anyone
with the legal right/illegal desire to access the code.

--Jeff
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Lukáš Lalinský wrote:
> Anyway, I think a build-time option to disable these formats should take
> care of any issues.
>  

 From what Rex said that would seem to be true, but I have to say
doesn't make any sense for me.  Do distros not have a problem
distributing the source for something that they object to distributing
the binary for?

-Scott
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Jeff Mitchell wrote:
> Plus we now had to
> add a bunch of configure checks in against Taglib 1.5 because some of
> the formats are now supported directly in Taglib so we had to remove our
> support to avoid duplicate symbols if Taglib 1.5 was on the system.

To be fair, I mentioned this to you and a couple of the Amarok guys a
few months back, before the last KDE 3 based release and bothered about
it.  Amarok really shouldn't be using the TagLib namespace in its
extensions because it makes the chance for symbol clashes particularly high.

-Scott

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Jeff Mitchell wrote:
> Ahh, I don't honestly remember that, but it is true, it does raise the
> potential.
>
> But I do stand by my remarks...if the Fedora lawyers look at the issue
> and decide that it is acceptable to have those formats as a
> compile-time dependency disabled by default, I think that would
> probably be good enough for most other distros, and it would help with
> Taglib packaging immensely.

Yes, that seems to be a reasonable strategy to me too.

-Scott
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[Serge Baranov-2]

Hello Scott,

Tuesday, February 26, 2008, 5:58:30 AM, you wrote:

S> Lukáš Lalinský wrote:
>> Anyway, I think a build-time option to disable these formats should take
>> care of any issues.
>>  

S>  From what Rex said that would seem to be true, but I have to say
S> doesn't make any sense for me.  Do distros not have a problem
S> distributing the source for something that they object to distributing
S> the binary for?

Not sure if it's a valid example, but see
http://www.freetype.org/patents.html :

"Is FreeType 2 Affected by the Patents?

The answer is no for any recent build of FreeType 2, since it comes
with an ‘auto-hinting’ module that was specifically designed to
completely ignore the TrueType bytecode instructions.

However, the source code for the bytecode interpreter is still
available and can be toggled on at compile time, for those that want
to use it anyway (because they purchased a license from Apple, or
because they are in a country where the patents do not apply, etc.).
For details please check the documentation that comes with your
FreeType source package (it normally involves changing one
configuration macro)."


--
Best regards,
 Serge                            mailto:serge@...

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Jeff Mitchell wrote:

> Lukáš Lalinský wrote:
>> The thing is that they already do distribute it. For example they don't
>> seem to mind to have it as part of Amarok. Specifically Fedora even used
>> to have a back-ported patch, not just vanilla source tarball, to fix the
>> ASF support in Amarok.

> Why didn't they send it to us to fix upstream?  :-(

back-ported patch = pulled the patch from amarok's svn (post 1.4.7, pre
1.4.8 release).

-- Rex

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Scott Wheeler wrote:

> Lukáš Lalinský wrote:
>> Anyway, I think a build-time option to disable these formats should take
>> care of any issues.

>  From what Rex said that would seem to be true, but I have to say
> doesn't make any sense for me.  Do distros not have a problem
> distributing the source for something that they object to distributing
> the binary for?

Dunno what other distros do, but fedora's usual policy is to strip out the
patent-encumbered bits from the distributed source as well (via modified
tarballs, etc...).

-- Rex

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Rex Dieter wrote:
> Dunno what other distros do, but fedora's usual policy is to strip out the
> patent-encumbered bits from the distributed source as well (via modified
> tarballs, etc...).
>  
Still a win.  Then they can strip it once out of Taglib instead of
multiple times from projects that add the patent-encumbered bits on  :-)

Of course, Fedora is a US-based distro, so their behavior may not match
what other distros do...

--Jeff
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Nice work on the taglib 1.5.
It's  working great on windows as well. We're using it in the
development of musikCube 2.

Best regards
Daniel
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Rex Dieter wrote:

> Rex Dieter wrote:
>
>  
>> Scott Wheeler wrote:
>>    
>
>  
>>> What would it take to get them to do a quick review on ASF?  It would be
>>> wonderful if it were possible to get an answer from them on that.
>>>      
>> Sure, I'll see what I can do.
>>    
>
> query sent.  
>  

Hi Rex --

Did you ever hear back on this?

-Scott
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Scott Wheeler wrote:

> Rex Dieter wrote:
>> Rex Dieter wrote:
>>
>>  
>>> Scott Wheeler wrote:
>>>    
>>
>>  
>>>> What would it take to get them to do a quick review on ASF?  It
>>>> would be
>>>> wonderful if it were possible to get an answer from them on that.
>>>>      
>>> Sure, I'll see what I can do.

>> query sent.    
>
> Hi Rex --
> Did you ever hear back on this?

*grumble grumble*, no, I'll re-ping.

-- Rex

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> Scott Wheeler wrote:

> What would it take to get them to do a quick legal review on ASF?

Here's the response I received:
"Short answer, I'd rather we avoided it. If Microsoft is hunting down
users of the ASF container, they certainly think it is patented."

The "we" here, was wrt to "fedora" and including asf-container support, but
you get the idea otherwise.

-- Rex

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