I'm happy to announce that the new audio engine which uses the BASS audio library is (finally!!) finished and has been committed to SVN. Here are a few of the feature highlights:
Player Features:
Native Visualization Support:
Note that these features ONLY work if you have selected "Internal Music Player" on the Music-->Player Settings page in Configuration.exe.
Known Issues: "Now playing" visualization breaks on first track change. This issue was discovered after comitting the changes to SVN and it's too late to fix tonight wtf: bed time!). I will address this issue ASAP.
There's bound to be a couple of bugs so please report any problems here and remember to post your logs to pastebin.
[EDIT]
If you're using Sonique visualizations you'll need to save them to the \MusicPlayer\plugins\visualizations folder in your MediaPortal folder. For all other visualization types (SoundSpectrum, WMP) you don't need to do anything as MP will find them automatically
[/EDIT]
[EDIT2]
Just realized that I never mentioned that we're using the EXCELLENT BASS audio library
[/EDIT2]
Enjoy!
Steve
Player Features:
Quick start up (under 2 seconds typically) -- no more waiting for the external player to launch before music playback begins
Supports the following file types out of the box (no codec installation required):
ape, flac, mp3, ogg, wv, wma, mp4, m4a, m4p, and mpc
Cross-fading -- configurable from 0 - 16 seconds (default: 4 seconds)
Gapless playback (default: disabled)
Buffering -- configurable from 1 to 8 seconds (default: 5 seconds)
Soft-start / soft-stop -- fades volume in or out when a track is manually started or stopped (default: enabled)
Seek forward and seek back -- uses MP's configured seek steps; 15sec-->30sec-->1minute etc (Default: no configuration required)
Native Visualization Support:
MP no longer relies on WMP for visualization display
Supports the following visualization plugins:
SoundStream -- G-Force and WhiteCap v5.0 and higher (currently in beta). Visit SoundSpectrum and check out thier excellent visualizations!
Sonique -- The XMPlay site has a great assortment of Sonique visualization plugins
WMP -- not all visualizations supported. I'll be working on this furthur in coming weeks
New music overlay cover art fade-in/out alpha-blending over visualization animation
Visualization on Now playing screen (default: enabled)
Fullscreen visualization status display (default: disabled) shows a track info overlay image when a track changes and displays playstate images such as play, pause, ff, etc (note that this requires a fairly fast cpu so you'll want to leave this disabled on systems slower than P4 2.66GHz) When enabled, the track info overlay pops up on each track change. Pressing <F3> to shows or dismisses the track info overlay.
Rendering is done on a seperate thread so visualizations in fullscreen mode no longer freezes the rest of MP and MP no longer blocks while the visualization is initializing
Note that these features ONLY work if you have selected "Internal Music Player" on the Music-->Player Settings page in Configuration.exe.
Known Issues: "Now playing" visualization breaks on first track change. This issue was discovered after comitting the changes to SVN and it's too late to fix tonight wtf: bed time!). I will address this issue ASAP.
There's bound to be a couple of bugs so please report any problems here and remember to post your logs to pastebin.
[EDIT]
If you're using Sonique visualizations you'll need to save them to the \MusicPlayer\plugins\visualizations folder in your MediaPortal folder. For all other visualization types (SoundSpectrum, WMP) you don't need to do anything as MP will find them automatically
[/EDIT]
[EDIT2]
Just realized that I never mentioned that we're using the EXCELLENT BASS audio library
[/EDIT2]
Enjoy!
Steve