Working on new Snakeoil release - 1.3.x (Codename Measurements)

[agent_kith]

OK folks. Last few years have been really busy for me professionally (Across 3 jobs). It was rewarding at times, however it was stressful most times as well. This current job I have is probably one of the worse as a co-worker is slack, combative making the situation really bad for me mentally. He left the company last month. And things are looking good. I realised last Friday I seem to have finished things which I expected will take me 2 months to do. So effectively I am 2x more productive? Or is it? Dawned on me I am back to my normal working pace because I don't have to waste time fixing his problems, arguing with him about things that really has no point arguing about. Let's face it. The guy is weird. On hindsight I realised the constant arguments we have always happened when we aren't alone.  Yes I'm still traumatised by this experience as this is the first time I have worked with somebody like him.

This is really not about me whinging. Well, it kind of is, but not really. I've just spent 12 months at this place, and I have written 140,000 lines of code (Javascript and C++). That's nearly 10k lines a month which is really takes the wind out of me. Hopefully now I am in a much better state of mind, and in a better position to churn out Snakeoil updates like before (It has been years).

First up I guess is to take in feedback. I will focus on the following things for the upcoming release, codename Measurements.


Better Install
With beefier hardware, and no bandwidth quotas I think it's time for me to abandon the restrictive way of downloading the installer. From this release onwards you no longer have to subscribe to the forum to download the installer. 

You'll still need to install the base (host) operating system. However, after which all you'll need to do is to run a single command from a shell session and follow the prompts.

Yes. There will be prompts now. This will fix the 20 minute delay in the RPi Installer. Something is easy to fix but I just don't have the time to.

Will have to see opening the install to everybody goes. I'm hoping CloudFlare will protect me from this. At least with 2 physical servers at best the malicious guy can take down the download server, but the forums and support will continue to function. More importantly because there's no longer any bandwidth quotas it means I do not have to worry about a big bill at the end of the month!


Better Raspberry Pi Support
My intention is always to move my primary listening rig to the Pi platform (preferably CM4 based). The plan is get an expansion board with a PCI-e interface powered by a CM4 board. The thing is I never get to execute this plan as I spent the past few years as switching from so many jobs.

First big announcement will be - aarch64 support! Via the form of Ubuntu. Mainly because Bookworm is yet to be officially supported by Raspi OS. When that is released Snakeoil OS will eventually support them too. So yes, Raspberry Pi will support at least 3 variants for now:

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (aarch64)
  
• Bookworm (armv7 and aarch64) Update 28 Oct 23: Not supporting armv7 for now since Bookworm defaults to 64 bit kernel running 32 bit applications. See this post for context.
  

Eventually this is likely to trickle down to only 1 platform. Going to do 3 for now so I can evaluate all 3 to find something that works best for me. 

And technically there will only be 1 version for the Pi at time of this post - Ubuntu 23.04 aarch64.


DSP Support
I will probably need the forum's help to get this up. Seems DSP is popular with people (especially people using it as a cross-over or room correction). 


In Conclusion
So that's about it for now. Spent yesterday setting up services on the cloud to test feasibility of the new installation method and everything seems to be working so far. So over the next several days I will build up a aarch64 build environment and then work on the installer. Once that is ready Measurements can be released and DSP support in the WebApp will be added in one of the point releases.

With the toxic guy gone I'm actually starting to enjoy listening to music again. This one is particularly good (I have NFI what the lyrics are, but there are a lot of things I like about how this is composed and performed). Will try and find this album when I go to HK early next year, but I expect the album to be heavily compressed..