Right now I really don't want to deal with getting this plugin in default Ubuntu unless the Rhythmbox developers first integrate it upstream into their own source tree. Otherwise I would have to effectively patch the rhythmbox package in Ubuntu, which is a lot more work. A PPA should be easier, and providing end-user instructions is yet easier for me
If I ever get this upstream to the Rhythmbox maintainers, all of this distribution headache will disappear automatically. If you want to help get rbpitch into upstream Rhythmbox, you can help! Contact Jonathan Matthew, current maintainer of Rhythmbox, and ask him to work with the author of rbpitch (he'll know who that is, me) to get it into upstream Rhythmbox. His contact info is at http://live.gnome.org/JonathanMatthew
I may soon put this up on a PPA, but I've never done it before, so it will likely take me a lot of time and lost hair. Just reading the packaging guide is making my head spin, and I've used Linux (with heavy CLI usage) for 9 years.
For the more adventurous type, I'll post a concise guide of the build steps, but I can't give click-by-click / keystroke-by-keystroke instructions. This guide assumes familiarity with compiling software from source using the CLI.
You can either do all of the following using a root shell (e.g. sudo bash), or add sudo to each of the commands that require root privileges (apt*, make install, etc.)
Code:
apt-get build-dep rhythmbox
aptitude install build-essential valac libvala-dev vala-utils gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad git-core autoconf automake
apt-get source rhythmbox
cd rhythmbox-*
git clone git://tiyukquellmalz.org/rbpitch.git plugins/rbpitch
cd plugins
patch -p0 < rbpitch/patches/ubuntu/9.10/Makefile.am.patch
cd ..
patch -p0 < plugins/rbpitch/patches/ubuntu/9.10/configure.ac.patch
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-vala
make -j2
make install
You can be reasonably certain that the install succeeded if the contents of the /usr/lib/rhythmbox/plugins/rbpitch/ directory are as follows:
Code:
librbpitch.a librbpitch.la librbpitch.so rbpitch.rb-plugin rbpitch-layout.xml
If you have problems once those files exist, it's probably a coding error on my part.
I have yet to document how to use the GUI, but very briefly, you will see "Pitch and Tempo Shifting" in Edit -> Plugins. Make sure it's checked. Then another button will appear next to the shell player (play/pause/next/prev buttons). Click that and the main window appears. You can either close the rbpitch window or toggle the button to make the rbpitch UI go away, but its changes will remain in effect.
P.S. -- If you have a pre-existing rbpitch source tree that you want to reuse, make sure to run `git pull' -- I have made several updates and fixes very recently.
Let me know if you have any further problems with the instructions I posted here. If you check the README.txt in the distribution, I also posted instructions for doing this with vanilla Rhythmbox -- but Ubuntu ships some patches to Rhythmbox, so I thought it was worthwhile to use the Ubuntu sources.
Finally, I will only support rbpitch on Ubuntu 9.10 or later. I'll happily also support it on prereleases of 10.04, but don't ask me about 9.04 or earlier please.
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