Hootie

Overview

Hootie is a PyQt6 desktop application for creating DVD-Audio discs on Linux. It wraps the complexity of audio format conversion, disc capacity estimation, and optical burning behind a drag-and-drop interface with quality presets and metadata management.

Key Features

• Drag-and-Drop Track Management: Build disc layouts by dragging audio files into groups with automatic format detection via ffprobe.
• Quality Presets: Pre-configured profiles for different audio quality targets with real-time disc capacity estimation.
• Format Conversion: Handles transcoding between audio formats as needed for DVD-Audio compliance.
• Optical Burning: Integrated disc burning using growisofs/wodim with progress tracking.
• Project Save/Load: Persistent .hoot project format for saving and resuming disc builds.
• Dependency Checking: Validates that all required system tools are available at startup.

Technology Stack

• GUI: Python 3.11+, PyQt6
• Audio: ffprobe for analysis, ffmpeg for conversion
• Burning: growisofs, wodim
• Platform: Linux-specific tooling

Current Status

Active development with core authoring workflow functional. Track management, format conversion, and disc burning operational.