Crossfading for GStreamer

I'm Happy,

..because it's finally working: Crossfading for amaroK's GStreamer-engine. Two weeks of deep hacking, no less, to get this beast stable and smooth. Now we have an implementation of a n-track crossfader design, with unlimited number of channels for mixing, and configurable transition time. Each input pipeline is running in it's own thread, connected to an output pipeline, which is also a dedicated thread with its own scheduler.

The multithreading is really needed to make the transition smooth and prevent dropouts, but it also made the implementation difficult. GStreamer is very flexible - it lets you do pretty much anything you want, but to make it do exciting stuff a little aside the standard path, you need to get a good grip on the internals. Crossfading was especially difficult since this hasn't been done before with gst, so there was no example code available. This meant a lot of hack/crash/grok/fix cycles for me, but finally it works pretty well, and it sure gives me a warm feeling.

On a related note, amaroK has born a new engine baby; it is called MAS - the engine number 5. Check it out while fresh =)