NAudio and GitHub Update

It’s been just over two months since I announced that NAudio was moving to GitHub, and I thought it would be good to give a brief update about what’s happened since.

More Contributions

First of all, one of the things I was hoping for by making the move, was to make it easier for people to contribute. That side of things has been a roaring success. In the first two months I had 10 pull requests. On CodePlex I got one every few months.

What’s more the quality of pull requests has been very good. One of the jobs of an open source project maintainer that I don’t find particularly enjoyable is telling people that I won’t be accepting their contribution. But so far, the pull requests I’ve received have all been very good, adding new features or bugfixes without breaking existing behaviour.

Easier Pull Request Acceptance

This brings me onto the other benefit. The big green “accept” button in GitHub has made it trivially easy for me to accept these pull requests into the main project. This is an absolutely killer feature of GitHub, and has allowed me to accept most of the 10 pull requests so far with minimal effort beyond a code review and a bit of a discussion with the contributor.

The NAudio Organization

Another reason I gave for moving to GitHub was the ability to have an organization page. So the NAudio organization could feature additional audio projects that relate to NAudio in some way. And I’m pleased to say that this has already started to happen. I’ve been able to bring Andrew Ward (ioctlLR) onto the team, and he has added in his Vorbis decoder for NAudio and he is in the process of adding in NLayer, a fully managed MP3 decoder that I originally ported from JavaLayer, but has since been completely reworked by Andrew.

So the benefits of the organization are already paying off, and I am hoping we can bring in some other related libraries in the future too.

Documentation

Finally, there is one benefit of moving to GitHub that hasn’t been realized yet, and that’s better documentation. And that’s entirely my fault. I’ve been very busy this last two months working on my next Pluralsight course (more information coming on that in the near future), and of course, documentation is hardly the most enjoyable part of open source. So please be patient. For now, the CodePlex site remains the best place to read about NAudio, but hopefully one day we’ll get everything moved over to GitHub.