Testers needed for a Nero AAC GUI

[HymnToLife]

Hi everyone

So as the title says, I'd like a few people to test a small PyQt thing I've been coding for the last few days. It was mostly a learning experience but I thought I'd better code something that could be useful, so it's a GUI for the Nero Digital AAC encoder for Linux, and because I suck at finding names, it's called NALG (which stands for Nero AAC for Linux GUI).

You can get it here.

There is a README but here's in short what you need in order to use it:

* PyQt 4, which you can install in Debian/Ubuntu by installing the package python-qt4.

* The encoder itself, you can get it from here.

Then extract the archive, browse to the dir and run it with

python NALG.py

The rest should be pretty straightforward. Thanks to anyone that will spend a bit of his time testing it

[mc2man]

It seems to do a decent job of encoding (don't convert to AAC much
While I don't remember if this happened initially it certainly is now -
NALG only opens (the gui) when it can't find neroAacEnc. In other words it works once, the next time it opens (with the correct path already set) it fails. Moving neroAacEnc to a different location allows it to open.
Ex. (2nd attempt to open

doug@doug-desktop:~/Desktop/NALG-0.1rc2$ python NALG.py
Starting NALG...
*************************************************************
*                                                           *
*  Nero Digital Audio Reference MPEG-4 & 3GPP Audio Encoder *
*  Copyright 2007 Nero AG                                   *
*  All Rights Reserved Worldwide                            *
*                                                           *
*  Package build date: Aug  6 2007                          *
*                                                           *
*                                                           *
*  See -help for a complete list of available parameters.   *
*                                                           *
*************************************************************

ERROR: no input file specified
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "NALG.py", line 831, in <module>
    mainWindow = NALGMainWindow()
  File "NALG.py", line 157, in __init__
    self.updateNeroFileName(settings.value("neroPath").toString(), False, True)
  File "NALG.py", line 277, in updateNeroFileName
    self.__inputFileNameExists)
AttributeError: _NALGMainWindow__inputFileNameExists

After moving nero (gui will open and encode properly (after setting new path

doug@doug-desktop:~/Desktop/NALG-0.1rc2$ python NALG.py
Starting NALG...
sh: /home/doug/Desktop/neroAacEnc: not found
*************************************************************
ect.,ect.
Good bye!

So if I keep moving neroAaEnc back and forth from home dir. and desktop NALG opens and works fine
Where are the settings stored?

[HymnToLife]

Hmm, thanks, I'll look into this

The settings are stored using Qt's QSettings system, which is basically an INI-like file stored at a location that depends on the platform. On *nix, it's "~/.config/Firas Kraïem/NALG.conf".

I also need to get rid of those dummy outputs, by the way NALG tries to execute the encoder without any argument, just to check whether or not it's executable, but we don't need the output there (but eventually, the user will not be supposed to see what happens in the terminal anymore, anyway)...

EDIT : fixed, rc3 is here to test I'll clean the output thing and do some more thourough testing, and I think we'll be good for 0.1.

[Rasi]

hmm.. i think its a bad idea to have a config dir that needs escape characters. you should think about chosing a name without spaces...

*edit*
even worse you use unicode-only characters, which can lead to major incompatibility problems...

[HymnToLife]

Originally Posted by Rasi

*edit*
even worse you use unicode-only characters, which can lead to major incompatibility problems...

Why would it? No one uses FAT32 anymore...

[Sharktooth]

USB keys, external hard drives, etc are usually using FAT32...

[HymnToLife]

Originally Posted by Sharktooth

USB keys, external hard drives, etc are usually using FAT32...

Yeah, but the config is stored in the user's HOME directory, and I don't know of anyone who uses FAT32 for that (it would be a very bad idea, by the way). Also, the name of the config file itself contains only ASCII characters, so tranferring if from one system to another via an USB key will not cause problems.

Actually, I did wonder whether or not I should leave the space and non-ASCII character as they are, and finally decided to leave them. We have Unicode for a reason

[Sharktooth]

BUGS: when moving the bitrate slider (profile window) with arrow keys the bitrate value doesnt change (this may be a pyqt4 bindings bug). also the max bitrate (2000) is too high. 640 will be enough even for multichannel audio. The window has no title.

[HymnToLife]

Originally Posted by Sharktooth

The window has no title.

Yeah, I've been trying to figure that one out pretty much from the start. I guess I'll have to ask for help on the PyQt mailing lists

And I'l look into the others, thanks a lot (I've also been wondering how much to set the max bitrate at, I guess I'll set it to 640).

[mc2man]

while I can see how to enable the file output box is it possible to allow saving to different location? The only thing that is 'used' by editing in there is the ext.

[HymnToLife]

Originally Posted by mc2man

while I can see how to enable the file output box is it possible to allow saving to different location? The only thing that is 'used' by editing in there is the ext.

Saving to different locations will come at a later time (I think I forgot to add that in the TODO list, btw ). This is a first version, so my goal with it was to have something that works (i.e. implement the basic features and eliminate all the bugs). Then I'll move on to adding others.

[mc2man]

Saving to different locations will come at a later time

That would be certainly be useful when using an input that couldn't be an output like a cdda mount.
If it's a .gvfs/cdda..... then the path would have to be typed in, you could consider adding 'show hidden dir.' to browse options