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[Fraggie]

1. I hate to repeat myself, but why not - I could do it this time... Is it a big problem to make an IT-like active channels indicator (current/peak) and display it like Speed/BPM? I would be nice to have a mental image of what's happening in the patterns... (Since we have no pattern viewer... )

2. I think it's not a big deal to add StarTrekker FLT8/EX08 loading. It's almost like 8CHN FastTracker, but instead of 8 channel patterns, there are normal 4 channel patterns but paired (patterns 0 and 1 together is really pattern 0, patterns 2 and 3 is really pattern 1, and so on... Channels of the second pattern become channels 5 to 8 of the resulting pattern.). And in the end the order table has to be divided by two. Simple as that. I only have two FLT8 modules, but you never know...

3. Problem with AudioSculpture modules. These files look like normal StarTrekker modules (FLT4/FLT8/EXO4/EXO8 ids), but have synthetic instruments (AM or FM) among or instead of samples (it's like the adlib S3M-s). XMPlay can't play these instruments, so the song sounds horrible (if it does sound at all). The information how to play the synthetic sounds is stored in a separate file (with *.nt or *.as extension). I can't think of any way for XMPlay to support it (DeliPlayer uses Amiga emulation), so I suppose it's better not to load them at all. (Someone can get confused and think the player is buggy...) You can identify these files by checking sample info - the synthetic instruments have the volume set (looks like it's always 0x40) while the sample length is zero (it only applies to FLTx/EXOx ids).

4. Is it possible to correctly detect duration of this module (Light and Sound part IV)? Without always/auto loop options only first 20 seconds of almost 3 minutes are played... Just watch the position bar and order display... Boy, a pattern viewer would be much more amusing than any visualisation...

5. Genarally any module (MOD, IT, whatever) in which patterns "go from backward" has miscalculated duration (this is almost every module by the Dreamer dude. ).

(The two FLT8, Light & sound, and some Audio Sculpture examples just went to your FTP.)

That is all. For now...

[Ian @ un4seen]

1. I hate to repeat myself, but why not - I could do it this time... Is it a big problem to make an IT-like active channels indicator (current/peak) and display it like Speed/BPM? I would be nice to have a mental image of what's happening in the patterns... (Since we have no pattern viewer... )

I was planning to add a basic pattern view in a future version, so it's not totally out of the question

5. Genarally any module (MOD, IT, whatever) in which patterns "go from backward" has miscalculated duration (this is almost every module by the Dreamer dude. ).

It should still calculate the correct duration of a track that jumps about, although it may not play the whole track unless one of the looping modes is enabled... I'll checkout the files you uploaded. Cheers.

[Pike84]

I thought maybe I won't flood this forum any more by starting a new thread... Anyway few things to mention:

I noticed that when the playlist size has been changed horizontally, using any of the remove options resets the size to the initial one.

'Minimize to tray' -option would be cool

Skin support would be cool too

Can't think of anything else right now... Xmplay must be near perfect now!

[Olego]

Kynes,

It seems like the whole discussion about skins has skipped you...  For now, from what's been said, there will be 3 different internal skins.  The default will stay the same, and other ones, as proposed, will be added later as a downloadable option.  Did I get that all right?

But XMPlay is good without any more than 3 of those skins...  So I'm quite content!  

~Olego~

[Pike84]

Oh, well... I really have been away from here quite a while :-/ Just can't keep my mouth shut!

Maybe Xmplay won't actually need those skins, but perhaps they'll earn some attention - after all Xmplay IS going to be the most popular music machine on people's PCs, isn't it?

[Rah'Dick]

I'm sure it will be!

[Olego]

Hi everyone,

Didn't want to start a new thread because of this bug:

I used the codec to write a song in a crummy mp3 format, and saved it on the desktop as aquarium.xm.wav.  (I love the song!)  Then, I closed XMPlay and deleted the song; opened XMPlay and pressed enter.  It started "loading" it, and it loaded, and loaded, until I pressed stop.  Then it just stopped responding altogether.  No other songs were on the playlist, just the one that I deleted from my HD.  That's all, folks!

~Olego~

[Olego]

By the way,

The counter in the small mode is malfunctionining, on my system, only with WinXP, and it works fine in 2000.  Weird?  Yes!  But the mini-on-top mode is pretty ubiquous, so if I minimize and restore it, it'll still be on top.  Strange!

~Olego~

[Killi]

In my opinion, xmplay shouldn't ever become popular.. popular things suck.

[Pike84]

No, no, no... Popular things can be good too - the reason why they may suck is because popular things often cost. So it may go like popular=commercial, but that doesn't have to be a necessity.
Popular things are often more complete than not-so-popular ones because there are more people to complain... more olegos to make things perfect

[Olego]

 Thank you for the compliment (I assume it was a compliment)!  My opinion:

Popular things tend to get commercial.  Commercial things tend to start caring about money and sponsors.  Sponsors tend to start wanting to attract more and more people.  They make pretty websites, pretty skins, pretty big downloads, and a whole bunch of useless stuff.  Ex: sonique cared about graphix more than anything.  WinAmp cared about attracting mp3 junkies more than anything.  So both of them were designed with skinnability first.

XMPlay has, does, and always will care about quality.  And by quality I don't mean how many people will use it, I mean how good the sound it, how many useful options is has, and how well-made it is.  And it's designed better than any other MOD player, save FT2 and IT2 themselves.  ()

Also, knowing Ian and all the people at this forum, they know what XMPlay is worth.  It well deserves the app of the month title, because it is!  We the perfectionists (Ralesk to a much greater extent than I) keep pointing out errors and comments to make XMPlay better for everyone.  And Ian is a great guy to listen to all of us, and make XMPlay better.  And in my opinion, even if XMPlay does become popular, it won't bloat to a 2 Meg download full of skins (e.g. YAMP), 'cause we (the "perfectionists" - he he) will always oppose it.    XMPlay is unbeatable!  

And that's my opinion.  

~Olego~

[Keltic Danor]

I'd hate to be a downer here, but I don't think you need to worry about XMPlay being that popular.

Although yes, xmplay to us is far better than anything winamp/sonique/freeamp/coolplayer/etc, it won't necesarily have the same effect on everyone.

Although skinning will attract a generous number of users, and for the usual aesthetic reasons.

However, in all the fights I have seen, the best never wins. XMPlay will create (and has) its own niche in the audio player software genre, but it's unlikely it will become more popular than winamp or maybe even sonique.

Simple because of who are behind winamp/sonique, big companies who will spend an large amount of money and time advertising and making sure that when someone looks for a player their slapped in the face with theirs.

If this were'nt how the world worked then we sure as hell would'nt be using IBM compatible pc's today, or VHS tapes. And we would'nt be using windows ( ah its nice to dream).

----------------------

Oh, I almost forgot.

When using the wav-writer-codec when you press cancel can you make it so it actually cancels, instead of asking where you want to put it. And is Output Error message for cancelled necessary.

While using IE you can click on a pls and say open with xmplay.exe, and it works fine. If however you do this in opera instead it open up xmplay again but still does'nt open the pls file. So if its open, xmplay opens twice but still does'nt play it.

I also found a unarchiving dll, that support -lh6- if you think it might be handy, I'll try and find some source for it too.

[Ian @ un4seen]

If you press cancel in the CODEC dialog, it switches to the standard WAV writer, and proceeds to display the file dialog. It also switches to the standard WAV writer if the CODEC doesn't like the format you've chosen. But CODEC will probably be gone in the next version anyway

I don't use Opera, so I'm not sure what's wrong there, but the way IE works is that it downloads the PLS to a temporary location and then tells XMPlay to load it from there. If it's possible, tell Opera to do the same.

If you can find source for the -lh6- method i'd be very interested, thanks. Or even just a description of the difference to -lh5- would probably do

[Keltic Danor]

The difference between codec and command line, is that the average person won't know how to use the lame/oggenc with XMPlay, where as codecs give a relatively straight forward and simple method of encoding files.

Oh, and I worked out how to get pls/m3u files working from opera, its seems opera is a bit strange in how it does things, but if you set pls/m3u files to use their default program (in filetype setting) it works fine.

[Ian @ un4seen]

Default settings for LAME and OGGENC will be included, so all that's required is to bung LAME.EXE and/or OGGENC.EXE in the XMPlay directory... even noobs should be ok

[Keltic Danor]

Oh, that should be fine then.

I'll chop out the codec section in the helpsite (good thing I have'nt started it yet), and add how to use and setup a number of encoder, such as lame,oggenc (these two just so people know what to change.)/flac/shorten/anything others I can think of, etc..

[R-Type]

Hi,

A few things about XMPlay. If been using XMPlay for a very
long time  . And I love it to bits. But just as KelticDanor said
XMPlay is not for the big public. The reason beeing that it is not well known. Everyone knows of winamp or sonique but not of XMPlay.

Adding winamp plug-ins support is a blast   Thanks very much for that! Now I can listend to my Nintendo game music. (nsf "nes  8-bit" spc "snes 16-bit") From within XMPlay  .
And i can even load my old Sinclair ZX Spectrum + (specs 48kb ram tv-out 1982 basic os) with tap files from XMPlay brrrrrr yea

One bug though. The GUI of XMPlay sometimes gets all over
my screen with the controls in the playlist or some other weird arrangement. (My system: Guillemot Geforce MX2 32 mb RAM and EIZO Flexscan F784-T 21" "1280x1024 desktop")

Please add the BIG option back  

R-Type

The Netherlands

[R-Type]

A little update to the above. I was forgotten to include my
os and driver version. I use Windows 98 SE and Nvidia 21.81
displaydrivers. On an Asus A7V266-E mainboard with Athlon
XP 1600+. The XP thread also had such a question  

R-Type

The Netherlands

[Ian @ un4seen]

I've noticed that happen on rare occasions on Win98 too. Forcing a refresh (for example, minimize & restore) gets things back to normal

[Fraggie]

Now something different.
Ian, on one mod XMPlay says it's "XM?". Does it mean that XMPlay is not sure whether it's an XM?   Or what?... But the file itself seems to play all right...

[Keltic Danor]

A xm file does'nt have to have an .xm extension. I have quite a few that have the mod extension (since they are mods). It does'nt matter too much since xmplay know what the file is.

If fact you can tell what the file really is by looking at the mod in notepad.

If its an XM, it'll have Extended Module written at the start.

[Ian @ un4seen]

XMPlay says "XM?" when it detects that the XM file was not made in FT2.

Most of the time it's not possible to detect what tracker an XM was made in, but some old MPT had a small difference in the header - it said "FastTracker v 2.00" instead of the normal "FastTracker v2.00". I don't think the new MPT versions do this anymore, which is a pity because it atleast made them detectable ... XMPlay also says "XM?" when there are more than 32 channels, because FT2 does not support more than 32 channels.

XMPlay does a few things differently for the non-FT2 detected files, to match some things that MPT does differently to FT2.

[Hakan]

Maybe not a good technique of detecting, but if the name of the Extended Module is padded, MPT pads it with zeros (0x00) whereas FT2 pads with spaces (0x20).

[Fraggie]

Now, with some IT files XMPlay says IT 2.15 or IT 2.16. As I'm concerned the last tracker version was 2.14 (patch 5 or sth), so what does it mean? And what are the differences to 2.14?

[Ralesk]

I think it was in one of the other txt files that came with IT:

Contributors Additions
 - IT215 file format saving. Note that this is an alternative compression
     format and is often better, but not always. Public releases of IT214
     Patch 1 and later can read IT215 compressed files. There is also a
     version of MikIT that can read IT215 compression.

[Fraggie]

Okay, but how do I enable IT215 saving? And what's 2.16?

[Ralesk]

>>>>>Contributors' Additions<<<<<

Only registered IT2.x have it

I have never heard of IT2.16, have to ask Jeff... if he ever answers...

[Fraggie]

>>>>>Contributors' Additions<<<<<

Only registered IT2.x have it

Doh!

I have never heard of IT2.16, have to ask Jeff... if he ever answers...

Well, it looks like it's something with the MIDI stuff... (Resonant filters or so...)

[raina]

The registered IT 2.16 has the 4 patches made for 2.14 and some candy like stereo disk writer.