Java News from Wednesday, February 4, 2004

I'm looking for a program, and I'm willing to pay for it. This program meeds to do one thing, and it doesn't even have to do it perfectly, but it has to do it well. I need an analog ripper which will record audio off my large collection of legacy cassete tapes. The criteria are as follows:

• It must run on Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, or Linux. (If all else fails, I'll consider Windows, but that would be significantly more difficult for me than using one of my preexisting systems.
• It must encode in either MP3 or OGG. AAC and Windows Media are not acceptable.
• It must be able to automatically find the breaks between songs.
• It must recognize most of the tapes, and automatcially insert all the meta-information by extracting the info from the usual sources like CDDB. And yes, it is possible to do this. This is done for CDs by recognizing song lengths and content. It does not depend on any meta-information stored on the CD. (There isn't any.) Nor does it take any hash code of the CD's digital content. It's based solely on the audio content that's also present on cassette tapes and LPs of the same albums.
• In the cases, where the tapes differ from the equivalent CDs by a song or two, and thus can't be matched with the database, the program should allow me to manually provide an album name, and then fill in the metadata for the songs it can match.

In other words, I want to do the minimum amount of work needed to rip my analog music collection onto disc. I should be able to plug the cassette player into the computer's microphone port, push one button on the cassette player, and one button in the program, and have everything else happen automatically. I'd pay up to $100 for this without thinking about it. I'd probably pay $200. $500 I might have to justify to my wife. Does anyone know if such a program exists? Drop me a line if you do.

The winlaf project has released Windows Look and Feel Fidelity (winlaf) 0.4. This set of utilities attempts to work around consistency issues in the Swing Windows Look & Feel. It's published under the Sun Public License.

Tom Copeland has released PMD 1.5, an open source tool for automatically checking Java code for various classes of bugs. PMD scans Java source code and looks for potential problems including:

• Unused local variables
• Empty catch blocks
• Unused parameters
• Empty if statements
• Duplicate import statements
• Unused private methods
• Classes which could be Singletons
• Short/long variable and method names

Version 1.5 adds checks for about a doze potential new problems, including

• Importing sun classes
• Empty finalizers
• Empty static intitializers
• Overloaded finalize methods
• Finalize does not call super.finalize()
• Dollars Signs in identifiers
• Method with the same name aas the enclosing class
• Explicit calls to finalize
• Empty statements
• "Suspicious" octal escapes
• "Suspicious" hash code method names

In my tests, PMD 1.5 found a few minor problems in the XOM code base (unused local variables, mostly, plus a few unnecessary assignments of null to object variables) but didn't turn up anything too major. This isn't necessarily a fair test, because XOM has been repeatedly checked with earlier versions of PMD as well as other similar tools, so most of the easy problems were found and fixed long ago. For a fairer test, I ran several of the rulesets across the XQuisitor code base. PMD didn't catch any problems at all in that code, which was a little surprising. XQuisitor is much smaller and simpler than XOM, but I didn't think the code was in such good shape.

IBM has released version 1.19 of Jikes, their open source Java compiler written in C. Vertsion 1.19 adds warnings for common problems such as empty catch blocks. This is a bug fix release. Jikes is published under the IBM Public License.

Robert Oloffson has posted version 0.39 of Java Memory Profiler (JMP). JMP uses the Java Virtual Machine Profiling Interface (JVMPI) interface to track objects and method times in a JVM. It uses a GTK+ interface to display statistics. The current instance count and the total amount of memory for each class is shown as is the total time spent in each method. This release lets you dump all the strings in memory and fixes a few bugs. JMP is written in C for Linux.