Looking for portable audio player

SDL Development
1

The day when Audiality will have a go at competing with IXS (high
quality music with microscopic file sizes) is coming closer. Of
course, doing it closed source, with vaporware tools and non-standard
data formats on only one platform won’t cut it. It must be LGPL,
based on real standards for which there are serious tools, and highly
portable.

Audiality itself should still be about as portable as Kobo Deluxe
(which means ~10 platforms), and SDL helps a great deal to reach that
goal. It serves as the fallback audio output API when there’s no
supported native API available. SDL also provides threading and some
other essential features.

However, Audiality is just an engine. It doesn’t have a GUI, and it
doesn’t (yet) run as a plugin of any kind. You can’t just download
Audiality as a binary, fire it up and play some music with a basic
media player GUI. (You can with some simple command line apps, but
that won’t cut it for your average Windows or Mac user.)

So, now I’m considering these alternatives:

1) Hacking a plugin wrapper to use an existing
   multiplatform media player.

2) Hacking a few different wrappers for different,
   single platform players.

3) Addapting an existing media player to my needs.

4) Writing Yet Another Media Player from scratch.

  1. is a problem, because there doesn’t seem to be such a player… Did
    I miss something?

  2. is more or less out, since I can’t test or even compile for more
    than two platforms; Linux/x86 and Win32. Don’t tell me to get access
    to more different platforms; I’m way too lazy, and would rather just
    have others do ‘./configure && make && make install’ for me. :wink:

  3. might work, if I could find a code base worth working on. Are there
    any? (Seem non-portable giants, ones with unsuitable licenses - I’d
    really prefer LGPL, messy beginner’s projects and whatnot…)

  4. might seem silly at first, but considering that I don’t really need
    more than a few buttons, a simple time display and possibly a
    primitive playlist editor, it appears to be a minimal effort, put in
    relation to the amount of work I put into Audiality. (It’s been in
    development since the first release of SKobo, and is now over 24000
    lines of pure C - and the TODO is 766 lines and still growing…) 4)
    also make some sense because I need some simple RT visualization and
    control tools for testing, tuning and debugging. This can easilly be
    integrated in a custom player. Finally, I might actually get it right
    and end up with something that could become a real player…

Anyway, why am I posting this on the SDL list?

Well, as it is, SDL fits the bill perfectly. I specifically do not
want a multiwindow GUI, but rather something looking like a 19" rack.
(Window that changes it’s size as needed.) It’s also more portable
than I’ll realistically need the player to be, and it’s capable of
delivering the speed, solid feel and responsiveness I want on any
supported platform. Finally, I know it pretty well, and it provides
pretty much all of the low level functionality I want.

(No, I don’t want a standard GUI toolkit for this, for several
reasons. Most importantly, I want truly concistent look’n’feel, and
no platform specific surprises. A button is just a rect and two or
three images, so the “toolkit” will be close to the one-night-hack
league.)

Anyway, after this long, boring rant, I just want to say that I’m open
to suggestions and pointers. It’s not like I desperatly want to hack
Yet Another Audio Player just for fun… (Although it might be.
Haven’t done much low level GUI programming lately. :slight_smile:

//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

.- The Return of Audiality! --------------------------------.
| Free/Open Source Audio Engine for use in Games or Studio. |
| RT and off-line synth. Scripting. Sample accurate timing. |
`---------------------------> http://olofson.net/audiality -’
— http://olofson.net — http://www.reologica.se —

2

Having spent a bit of time looking over SKobo’s source, I have a fairly
good idea of the awesome capabilities of Audiality. (That’s not flattery
either :slight_smile:

However, it is my opinion that most users will prefer a plugin for their
specific audio player, which means in general:

  1. WinAmp plugin
  2. XMMS Plugin

I’m personally not aware of any “gee golly swell” multiplatform audio
players at all really. There’s a multiplatform editor, that goes by the
name of “Audacity”, that has a plugin system. It works on Win32, OS9/X,
Linux/BSD. It is however, licensed under the GPL.

At the same time though, I do understand your view of creating a small
portable player. Which is probably fine since you’re not exactly out for
world domination (errr…right? :}) And as far as that’s concerned, like
you said SDL seems like the thing for that…

Anyway, I’ll step slowly away now, since I’m not exactly an audio
expert…On Thu, 2003-01-30 at 05:53, David Olofson wrote:

So, now I’m considering these alternatives:

  1. Hacking a plugin wrapper to use an existing
    multiplatform media player.

–
Shawn <@EvilTypeGuy>
http://www.warpcore.org/

3

So, now I’m considering these alternatives:

1) Hacking a plugin wrapper to use an existing
 multiplatform media player.

Having spent a bit of time looking over SKobo’s source, I have a
fairly good idea of the awesome capabilities of Audiality. (That’s
not flattery either :slight_smile:

And it’s not getting worse either. It might actually be usable any day
now. :wink:

However, it is my opinion that most users will prefer a plugin for
their specific audio player, which means in general:

  1. WinAmp plugin
  2. XMMS Plugin

Well, that should cover it, and probably isn’t too much work -
although I don’t even know where to start for Mac OS… Oh well.
Someone might actually care to contribute if it’s interesting enough.
:slight_smile:

I’m personally not aware of any “gee golly swell” multiplatform
audio players at all really. There’s a multiplatform editor, that
goes by the name of “Audacity”, that has a plugin system. It works
on Win32, OS9/X, Linux/BSD. It is however, licensed under the GPL.

http://audacity.sf.net/

At the same time though, I do understand your view of creating a
small portable player.

…with debugging features - which is maybe the real motivation to
do it. Might actually evolve into an editing and control GUI, which
is sort of required for general acceptance in the studio world. (It’s
pretty handy for tweaking sounds and effects, of course - these apps
don’t have GUIs only to have somewhere to stuff all that chrome.)

Which is probably fine since you’re not
exactly out for world domination (errr…right? :})

Well, you never know…! :wink:

And as far as
that’s concerned, like you said SDL seems like the thing for
that…

Yes… At least as a starting point. Maybe adding support for some
native toolkits (for muliple windows, file selectors and stuff) is a
good idea, but getting that to work for just one platform seems to
be almost as much work as doing the whole thing “game style” in
SDL…

Anyway, I’ll step slowly away now, since I’m not exactly an audio
expert…

Well, I’m not really a mainstream audio expert, OTOH - I’m normally
more concerned with technical details and stuff for studio use. That
is, more like Cubase, VST and heavy DSP stuff than WinAmp, player
plugins and SFX players for games.

Audiality will have to bridge the gap to be really interesting.

//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

.- The Return of Audiality! --------------------------------.
| Free/Open Source Audio Engine for use in Games or Studio. |
| RT and off-line synth. Scripting. Sample accurate timing. |
`---------------------------> http://olofson.net/audiality -’
— http://olofson.net — http://www.reologica.se —On Thursday 30 January 2003 16.38, Shawn wrote:

On Thu, 2003-01-30 at 05:53, David Olofson wrote: