4deckradio

Multi-deck media playback for radio stations

Still very early development

Prerequisites:

• gstreamer-1.0 or 0.10 (development packages)
• GTK-3.x (development packages)
• jackd
• make and optionally autotools

Compile:

There are two ways to compile 4deckradio.

First, the plain and simple approach without autotools:

• For gstreamer-1.0, run cd gstreamer && make -f Makefile.simple

• For gstreamer-0.10, run cd gstreamer && make OLDGSTREAMER=1 -f Makefile.simple

For packagers, there's the more sophisticated autotools-based approach:

./autogen.sh
./configure

configure will automatically build against gstreamer-1.0 if it can be found, else it will build against gstreamer-0.10.

If you want to explicitly specify which version of gstreamer to build against you can pass --with-old-gstreamer or --without-old-gstreamer to configure:

• For gstreamer-1.0: ./configure --without-old-gstreamer

• For gstreamer-0.10: ./configure --with-old-gstreamer

Then run: make make install

You don't have to install 4deckradio, you can also run the binary from the build directory.

Run:

./4deckradio [OPTION...]

    -f, --fullscreen        Fullscreen
    -a, --autoconnect       Autoconnect to jackd
    -g, --green=#00ff00     Background colour until 50% elapsed
    -y, --yellow=#ffff00    Background colour until 75% elapsed
    -r, --red=#ff0000       Background colour until 100% elapsed
    -h, --help              Show help options

Usage: (rudimentary documentation)

You select a file and press play. You could also press F9 .. F12 to start/stop the decks. Or you own a studio surface which sends joystick button press/release events.

If you have a USB joystick, simply connect it. Press Button 1, and it plays deck 1, release button 1, and it stops. Of course, you can also press Buttons 1-4 simultaneously to have all four decks playing at once.

Selecting a new file while one is playing queues the new file. Press stop or wait for the current one to finish to actually play it. (it's a safety for radio stations, so they're not accidentally stopping the current playback).

Same for stop: program only quits if you stop all four decks and then press Ctrl+q. Well, the window-close button is a shortcut, but it wouldn't be visible in fullscreen mode.