Whamb English Manual

Whamb Manual Stéphane Thiell May 22, 2003 1 What’s Whamb? 1.1 Concept Whamb is a digital audio player for Mac OS X. Unlike many other players, it has been developped for Mac OS X only. Thus, it is a native player for Mac OS X, which uses several new technologies that this modern operating system offers. This player is light because it avoids the use of any nonnative functionality of the system. Whamb ensures high-quality and exceptional fidelity for a minimal consumption of processor resources, thanks to CoreAudio. But Whamb is a general public audio player intended for a comfortable and ludic use, thus we added a very effective system of Skins (or appearence themes). Only a few knowledge in graphics is enough to create your own Skins. Quality of the Skins is obtained partly thanks to “Quartz”, still another new technology of Mac OS X. Whamb already supports MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, but is intended to be extended. MP3 & Ogg Audio streams are also supported. 1.2 More technical Whamb uses CoreAudio, CoreGraphics (more known as “Quartz”), and IOKit libraries (more precisely Frameworks), and sometimes even some functionality of the BSD layer. CoreAudio is, of course, very significant for Whamb because it ensures a sound quality and exceptional fidelity. Moreover, the direct use of CoreAudio reduces CPU time to the minimum. CoreAudio handles hardware abstraction, you can then use any sound cards recognized by Mac OS X. You can very easily choose specific audio hardware to use in Whamb. Finally, CoreAudio is first of all reserved for the new professional audio applications. Whamb innovates! CoreGraphics or “ Quartz ” support in Whamb allows it to fully take part of the graphic possibilities for the Skins. 2 Requirements Whamb is available only for Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar” or later. Version 10.1 of the system is too bugged and important features are missing so we can’t support it anymore. Obviously, you need a PowerPC Macintosh. By the way, Whamb’s code is optimized for these processors, and uses some Altivec possibilities on G4. The MP3ve plugin (ve for Velocity Engine) is Altivec optimized. 3 User guide 3.1 Installation Whamb 1.2 is not anymore distributed in a package (.pkg). Due to recurrent permission problems with the standard installer, we now have our own little quick installer. Just double-click on it. Once the installation is done, the following items are installed: • The application named Whamb.app in ”/Applications/” • The default Skins in ”/Library/Application Support/Whamb/Skins/” • If not possible, the installer puts the default Skins in your user domain: ”/Users/USER/Library/Application Support/Whamb/Skins/” Launch Whamb.app, that’s all! 1 3.2 Get Started Whamb is quite straightforward to use and ergonomic. You can …