Listen-up Project/DAISY Playing

[Willem van der Walt]

I wrote up what I knew in September last year regardding this.
In short, Emerson is the player I would put my effort behind at this 
point.
Its author, Markus Gilling, is the project lead for the daisy standards 
development project.
Emerson runs in a gui and can be used with orca.
According to Markus, modifying Emerson to have a text-only mode should be 
relatively easy.
Below is an extract from the document I wrote last September.
Kind regards, Willem

A look at, and comparison of the currently available open-source Daisy players

The following programs will be discussed.
Amis, Daisy-delite, DBR, Emerson, Idair, Listen-up.
All these programs are free of cost and open-source which both are big
advantages.
1.  Amis:
Strong points:
Amis, a Daisy Consortium supported project,
Is well maintained and development continue to keep it current with the
evolving daisy standard.
AMIS 3.0 was released May 5, 2009, see: http://daisy-trac.cvsdude.com/amis/wiki/WikiStart#CurrentStatus
and AMIS 3.1 is being worked on.

Amis Supports daisy standards reasonably well, including support for DAISY
3.
This DAISY player is working and being used by a large number of users  of
different nationalities, under 
Windows.  It is most likely the open-source Daisy player that had the most
real-world testing of those discussed here.
 
Amis, which is a self-voicing applichation, supports multi-lingual use well.
The audio prompts are provided using human-recorded voice, there by
providing a very clear sounding interface to the user.
By using the Ambulant back-end, AMIS supports multiple audio formats and
could potentially support video using this back-end.

Week points:
Although open-source, porting to other platforms than Windows is impractical
if not impossible.  It should how ever be possible to port the core library,
but more work is needed before this will become a reality.

The  very bulky back-end, (Ambulant), used by AMIS, although
 very flexable, is not strait forward to build on
any platform.

2.  Daisy delite.
Strong points:
DaisyDelight, originally written for the Apple Mackentosh, is easy to 
port among different platforms since it mainly uses very standard
Python, a language available on most important platforms.
Getting it to work under Linux required minimal changes during
experimentation.

This player has a well-defined separation between the engine 
and the user interface.
The design lends it to be repackaged as a python Daisy module for the engine
part, leaving many options for different user interfaces.
Week points:
DaisyDelight does not support important components of the Daisy standard 
like full-text synchronization.
 In its current state, DaisyDelight Does not work for any but very simple 
daisy 2.02 books.
It is no longer actively developed or maintained.
After finding the project web site,
http://neppord.is-a-geek.com/projects/daisyDelight/trac/, unavailable in 
early January 2009, the
author of DaisyDelight was contacted and responded on the 9th of January
2009 that the site was down and since there was no activity for a while,
getting it back up again was not a priority.
When checked on 14 September 2009, it was still down.

It only supports .mp3 as audio format, although changing this to include others
should be not too difficult.

3. DBR:
Strong points:
DBR should be reasonably easy to port among python-supported platforms as it
uses well-maintained, widely used libraries like gstreamer and gtk.
It is still maintained/developed,
Last entries in the Changelog is on 18 March 2009 and the current
development version is DBR 0.1.2.
It is available through subversion at:
https://dbr.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/dbr/trunk

Its authors intend DBR to have good daisy standard support in the future.
It already is capable of playing daisy 2.02 books in a usable way.
Week points:
The standard version only supports .mp3 audio, but a modification to make it
support most audio formats had been made During experimentation.
It does not support full-text/full-audio synchronization, but adding such
support is not precluded by the current design.
It does not support more complex navigation among levels well.
It currently uses a rather naive blunt-instrument approach to parsing the
daisy book.

Emerson:
Strong points:
It is written in Java, known to be a portable language.
Emerson was planned from the start to support the Daisy standards well on 
different platforms.
It already supports playing of Daisy 2.02 books better than all others except
Amis.
Week points:
Very early development with one developer who only can spend limited time
on the project.
Likely due to this fact, documentation is very limited and the building
process is not yet stream-lined 
Emerson currently is at version 0.6.2 and the last activity is on the 29th
of May 2009, (checked on 15 September 2009).
See: http://code.google.com/p/emerson-reader/
.
It still has a long way to go before it would support all 
of its rather impressive feature set.
One critical missing feature of which the addition would make it a lot more
usable, is the ability to switch levels in a daisy book.

Idair:
Strong points:
Idair is a text-only daisy player with the choice of a tcl gui.
It works reasonably well and has full-text/full-audio synchronization.
Week points:
Idair does not fully support daisy 2.02 although it works with most books.
Idair is no longer being maintained and the author is not interested in the 
project any longer.
Last release 0.8.3, was on 18 December 2003.  See http://idair.sourceforge.net/
On 5 May 2005, the author said:
"It's obsolete, please look at the amis project instead.

Regards,
Johan".
Around mid-September 2005 there were a number of people on the Daisy
Technical development list,  discussing the
merrits of this player and requests were made to the author to revive the
project, which he said he would considder.
  There might still be some merrit in reviving it, even today.
It does not compile under more modern Unixes.
The main focus were to get Idair to work well under  UNIX only, but there is
a 
Windows version and an OSX one too.
It only supports .mp3 audio.

Listen-up:
Listen-up is available from http://linux-speakup.org/listenup.html
 and was built to be a full-featured daisy player.

Strong points:
it supports most audio file formats
It supports full-text/full-audio synchronization.
Week points:
Listen-up was built to run on Linux,but it might be ported to other platforms
if another audio library is used.
It was built to be text-only, so would not be suited for none blind Daisy
users who need images and video.
Listen-up has not been maintained for a very long time.
The last changelog entry was made on 2003-09-17.

It therefore did not keep up with the evolving  daisy standards.


 


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