Do you have the gstreamer codecs' (see e.g. http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/mp3) ?

As for the organising, people say a good things about musicbrainz compatible players. Amarok and Banshee are just two. There are most likely several others.

Mons

That looks like gibberish to me. Do you really understand how Wine works?

Most of the machine language of a program is internal to that program. It runs directly on the machine itself without ongoing involvement of the OS. That machine language in a Windows application run with Wine runs directly on the hardware in Linux just as it would run directly on the hardware in Windows. No translation, no emulation, it just runs.

Most requests for OS action (reading files, displaying graphics, etc.) in a Windows application start as ordinary function calls from the main body of the application into a function in some DLL provided by Microsoft. Code in that function repackages the request into the undocumented form actually understood by the Windows kernel and reissues that form.

Most requests for OS action in a Windows application run in Wine start as the exact same function call but go into a DLL written as part of the Wine project, rather than a DLL written by Microsoft. That DLL might repackage the request, as it would in Windows, into some more primitive Windows request(s) that must be reprocessed by some deeper level of Wine, or it might directly issue the request as the equivalent Linux request.

Only requests for OS action require any Wine specific processing or overhead. The internal processing of the application has no overhead nor translation. I expect there are some examples of requests that would go directly to the Windows kernel, that must be intercepted by Wine and reissued to the Linux kernel, with some extra overhead involved in that intercept and reissue. But most OS requests in Windows already go through extra layers like that on the way from the application to the kernel, so in most cases Wine doesn't need to add any layers nor any extra overhead. Wine just needs to replace a layer between the application and the kernel that already existed. In many cases the original application request was some POSIX operation that Wine can pass to the Linux kernel in an even simpler way than the corresponding Windows layer can repackage for the Windows kernel. So Wine can sometime remove overhead in processing OS requests, rather than add overhead.

i got the mp3 plugins to work. thanks for all the help. it's been huge. i'll check out those management programs then too.

Hi,

You had better look at 'WINE's' web definition. WINE does translate;

I do believe that the understanding of a emulator/translator as defined as above is correct. Now I present the same question to you. Do you really understand how 'WINE' functions?

You're fueling the fire;

Either way you look at it there are translation/emulation layers going on with 'WINE' on the platform installed on. There's that darn 'API' again. Now what is an API;
Now if that is gibberish or the before mention 'WINE' excerpts then your definitions may apply.

Enough said!

Sorry, despite any similar words you quoted from Wine documentation, your earlier description still looks like gibberish.

Terminology is always difficult. What exactly is "translation" or "emulation". Wine has to deal with a number of complicated issues and I'm sure it does quite a lot of things, some of which might be described as translation or emulation. But most of it cannot be well described that way, and I don't think any of it can be described the way you did.

Whatever might be "translated" or "emulated", the machine instructions of the application most definitely are not translated nor emulated.

Certainly not every detail. But I do understand the basic internal operation.

That "translation layer", "program loader" quote is misleading, ambiguous and incomplete. But it isn't in any way gibberish. I can't think of a good introductory phrase they might have put there. There simply exists no common terminology for those concepts.

A loader is an important part of Wine, because Windows has a different file format for executables than Linux. But Wine does not translate Windows load format into Linux load format. It directly loads from the Windows load format. Also loading is a relatively small part of what Wine needs to do. Duplicating the functionality of a bunch of undocumented entry point in a bunch of DLLs is the big part.

Someone might call duplicating the functionality of an entry point "emulation" but that would be a misleading use of a term that is usually understood to mean something else.
Someone might use the term "translation" to describe rearranging the calling arguments of a function in order to redispatch the request to a different function for the same operation. But that also is a misleading use of the term.

But my issue above was not with specific words that might be misleading. It was with the entire phrase.

Probably you can find the phrase "machine instructions" used in Wine documentation. Certainly you can find words like "application" and "translation" and "kernel". But you've strung all those words together into nonsense.

Errrr.... Helooooo..

We seem to have two "threads" confused in one here:

twerked (the OP) wanted linux. He eventually got it
twerked wanted to play MP3s. He got there

Why are you discussing the finer points of WINE, emulators and translators in this thread?

Maybe time to break out and start a new thread perhaps, and just let this thread rest in peace, as "resolved" ?

It's not nonsense and I'm not going to continue drifting from the OP. Go argue with the 'WINE' people. Pun intended.

You apparently think that 'WINE' mystically runs M$ applications. It does not have control of the system, the kernel on the Linux system is in charge. I suggest that you just quit trying to spin as these definitions are taught in most CS and Software Engineer books.

Maybe you should rewrite or define the 'API', 'Emulation' and 'Translation' then submit to the 'WINE' people who wrote the phrase(s) that I quoted. I quoted to keep continuity which seems to be where some of your issues come from.

^^^^ I really think the 'WINE' people tried to wiggle a bit.

If you wish to carry on then PM me or start a thread relative to the subject in question. I'm sure that others will have more to add to the subject(s); 'WINE', 'Translator/Emulator' and even API as applied to 'WINE' with GNU/Linux.

I'm through with this drift within this thread.

Welcome, twerked.

This is a great place to find help. It was my second place to go after Google when I started with Linux.

There's a great primer for persons new to Linux at about dot com.

http://linux.about.com/

Sorry about the thread drift. I'll stop.

as semi off topic this thread went with the whole wine discussion, it was pretty helpful actually. though i don't really plan on using it, except for maybe adobe illustrator, i suppose it's useful information. and apparently illustrator doesn't work so well in any instance/emulator/translator/etc. which kind of sucks, because that's kind of needed as i'm trying to work on designs for a screenprinting company i'm helping start up

I waited a while before trying Wine because I assumed it would be more difficult than it was.

I haven't tried adobe illustrator, so maybe I'm unaware of some issue, but the programs I have tried with Wine have worked without problems. That included a few programs where there were very good reasons to expect problems.

I'm not sure what "adobe illustrator" does, but you may well find some linux programs that are as useful. Please take a look at scribus and inkscape, I think you'll like them both.

illustrator is a vector based drawing program..or i guess that is the best i can come up with. i'll check those other programs out. basically i need to be able to pull apart different layers of an image for multicolour printing jobs, draw/create designs, and ideally, like in photoshop, pull different colours from an image to make a separate layer from each

That's what inkscape is. It is very clever and has some awesome tools and effects. Layers? No problem.

The default install has some useful Help-> Tutorials to give you an idea of what can be achieved.

Now I'm getting a feel for what you are looking for, please look at potracegui as well.
It'll take a BMP or JPG file (and maybe others, I have limited experience) and convert it to a vector graphics file (SVG) suitable for opening in inkscape. I have no idea how it does this ( magic? ), but it does. It's not too good with colour, yet....

scribus:
Have fun!

If you want to watch movies you need libdvdcss that decrypts encrypted dvds and take your pick at the movie players mplayer or xine would work. Web browsing I cant think of a distro that doesn't come with browsers. For photo editing the is a plethora of programs to use, I prefer gimp but it can be a bit complex. For video editing I only know of one but i'm sure there are others, cinelerra for nonlinear and ffmpeg for linear editing. These are just some examples to check out.