Joining an IRC and Mailing List

     Yesterday in class I began with finding a suitable IRC client in order to view and participate in Banshee's IRC channel. Oh, by the way my team did choose to go with the Banshee Media Player. I started out with installing Pidgin and from there I tried to create and IRC account that connected to Banshee's IRC server which is irc.gnome.org. I was having a lot of trouble with trying to connect to the gnome server with Pidgin. Another student from another team overheard my troubles and suggested I install XChat because it was an easier IRC client to use. So I installed XChat, created a user name, and searched for the gnome network in the list of networks supplied by XChat. What I found though is that by default, XChat does not contain the gnome irc channel network, so I had to add it to the list. Once I created that network with the correct IRC path, it still could not connect to the server. The classmate that assisted me with the XChat said he was able to connect to his server and view traffic. Of course, his group could be using another IRC network other than Gnome. I figured it had to do something with the school's network setup so I decided to try it at home. Later that night I tried it again and this time the client was able to connect me to the Gnome network, but I found you have to specify the actual channel under the created network because it could not find a designated channel. So after I edited my Gnome network with the #banshee channel tag under my favorite channels, it connected to the channel and I was able to view everyone who uses the channel. There was not too much traffic going on, so I will try it later tonight and submit another blog based on the traffic experiences. Since I am at school right now my IRC client will not connect.

     Also, after messing around with my IRC client last night I also joined the mailing list for the Banshee project. I have never joined one of these lists before so I did not know really what to expect, but so far this morning I have experience about four e-mails relating to Banshee bugs and questions. The one e-mail thread that I decided to follow was about a user who was looking for bugs under Banshee's bugzilla account relating to Windows. Right now, the developers of the Banshee project are working on getting the software to run well on Windows. One of the developers, Gabriel Burt replied to the user's thread with a link to all the bugs relating to Windows. I followed the link to see what bugs are currently open. From looking at the list there is a lot of work to do with the Windows bugs. Some of the critical ones I came across are:

• Playing a song on Windows causes Banshee to crash
• Crash on Win32
• NowPlaying extension causes Banshee to crash on Windows

To go more in depth with one of these errors, I found some traffic on the crashing of banshee when a song plays. What was found in the traffic was that playing mp3 files threw an exception and caused the system to crash. On the other hand the .ogg format plays perfectly. Also, according to the traffic, on a clean install of Banshee on Windows, the only files that are able to play successfully are ogg, wma, asf, and flac files. These files are specified in Banshee's GStreamer PlayerEngine capabilities. So it appears that mp3 is not yet supported on the Windows side.

For the future I will continue to look into IRC traffic and look into other threads on the mailing list. I am still excited for this project and cannot wait to see what my group and I can do with it.