XMplay is the best audio player for windows I know. In my opinion there's nothing that comes even close to its flexibility, its ability to receive all sorts of radio streams, its over all snappy performance etc. etc. Still, there are a few improvements I'd like to see in a future version of XMplay ...
1 Record function
- there should be a dedicated record button next to the
play/stop buttons with which the recording of the
current radio stream can be started or stopped
(toggle function). Maybe this button could be
greyed out when instead of a radio stream a
local audio track is being played. Such a
change would, however, require new skins.
- it would be nice if recorded radio streams were stored
in a selectable pre-defined format (wav,flac,ogg,mp3).
I'm not sure how realistic this is as it requires an
on-the-fly re-coding of the stream. But it would be
very useful to avoid storing odd formats like ram.
- like now the recorded streams should all be stored in
the same pre-defined directory. There should also be
an option to put a time stamp in the file names to
make them unique and thus protect them from being
overwritten by subsequent recordings. The name
could look something like this ...
... with station name from the stream
"09-10-12 02-33-48 Psychedelic 60s Jukebox.mp3"
... or with station name from the library
"09-10-12 02-33-48 Blues- KOQX Blues Radio.mp3"
... or with beginning and end time stamps
"09-10-12 02-33-48 - 09-10-12 03-45-48.mp3"
... or with both stamps plus recording time
"09-10-12 02-33-48 - 09-10-12 03-45-48.mp3 - 1h 12m 0s"
etc. etc.
2 Directory player function
- when XMplay is set up to be the default audio player,
clicking on a track in the file manager launches
XMplay which then plays the track and stops. It
would be great if XMplay was able to create a
temporary playlist of all the audio tracks in
the current directory while playing the first
track, sorted the playlist by file name and
then continued to play the remaining tracks
from the current point on.
This way whole albums and track compilations that are
organized in a directory structure could more easily
be played. There would be no need for dedicated
playlists.
3 Linux!
- this has been discussed many times before and I know
that chances for a native Linux version of XMplay
are slim as it would probably require a complete
re-write. But even more so than in Windows there
is in my opinion no audio player for Linux that
comes even close to XMplay. So, I'm sure that
XMplay would be an instant hit in Linux if it
didn't come in the form of a binary blob. And
I think, that's where the main problem lies.
A GPL'd version of XMplay is maybe asking
a bit much ...
