[altie]

This is a duplicate of a post at Headwize, as I want as many answers to this as possible.

I have been looking for a good, involved programming project for a long time through which I might actually be able to create a useful product. Lately, I've been pretty dissatisfied with Winamp, XMMS, Apollo, and GQMPEG, so I thought it might be fun to try and write a better MP3 player.

I want to know what you think could be done better than anything anyone else out there is doing it. The foci of the project will probably be memory and processing efficiency, output quality, and playlist handling. The latter in particular has been a serious issue for me lately as it takes a bit of tomfoolery to get Explorer to work with Winamp to update a playlist of over 1200 songs. I'm thinking that I'll probably try to use some sort of a plugin to use *SQL for playlist handling to allow very advanced sorting options, fast loading and updating, and general robustness that seems to be lacking in all current MP3 players. What I really need suggestions on is the interface. Nothing seems terribly wrong with what's out there, but I want to push the envelope on all fronts possible with this project. Any suggestions are extremely welcome.

 

[jluetzen]

i guess the problem with your idea is, that this actually is
pretty hard to do. i've been following the progress of
winamp 3 and sonique 2 and judging from the delay both
projects are suffering from (and having quite a substantial
team behind them), i think that 1 person could have a
pretty hard time trying to outclass these players.

of course if you concentrate on the core features and forget
all those nilly-willy skin stuff (which seems to be all winamp 3
is about), things might get easier.
i personally like the winamp 3 playlist - system a lot, easy
to use, good sorting options.

what i would like to see would be features which allow me to
change the sound like crossfeed, stereo separation and all
this other equalizer stuff. you can have this through plug-ins
already, but they're costly and are not doing to well. (see
dfx and ozone).

interessing products as inspiration for you might be:
- xmplay: www.un4seen.com
- deliplayer: www.deliplayer.com
- dfx: www.fxsound.com
- ozone: www.izotope.com

good luck to you !
jluetzen