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PART 2 :: The Present Time. I am still a boy, just a bigger one, and still love all kinds of music. Mostly Alt rock, Classical, Blues, Jazz rock, music you can feel, the type that makes a story, a movie, a wake-up dream in your head when you close your eyes. That means no compromise in quality, both in music and reproduction. Now that I am an design engineer in electronics and micro-computer systems I often design audio related stuff like audio processors or audio players (hardware). So, in addition to pleasure listening, I also professionally need to play, convert and edit music almost every day, would it be for testing the latest Mp3 player or converting my latest songs to Ogg for my PDA. That where I got a problem ! |
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There are few players that are great, but not one can do it all. Some have so many features that I do not need and miss the obvious ones. Some have good play back quality but limited features. Some can almost do it all ... that is if you got 3 hours to find out how ! In brief, I need 5 audio players, 1 CD player, 3 converters and one editor on my desktop ! So one day I said "Enough ! I am going to make a player, just for me, with the features I need, and no more." The most important parameter was sound quality. Every player that uses codecs registered in windows will one day mess it up. The one I was using for listening, VUplayer, was always perfect. Never strange noises poping up here and there. So I used the same library (BASS) and started with open source code, modified about everything, fixed the zillions bugs and added what I needed. Alpha, my first PC player, was born: 
What you cannot see on this picture is that Alpha is quite a fantastic player: Very fast multi format playing and conversion, high quality sound and any feature are only 1 or 2 mouse clicks away. I liked it, my friends liked it and most importantly I was able to uninstall all my other players which by the way speeded up windows loading quite a bit ! Now, what you can see, Alpha it is not very "sexy" ! It is not resizable and some features are not very user friendly. Most of the comments I got from friends were: - Can you make it looks like winamp ? - Can you make it smaller ? - Can you make the converter easier to use ? I do not undertand the settings... I mostly program micro-controllers, in assembly language, and though I like to do PC programming it rarely happen. So I enjoyed a lot writing Alpha. I also learn a lot. I had enough knowledge to start again from scratch and as I love challenges too it was just a question of time before I re-write Alpha. And what a challenge ! My friends were basically asking me to make another Winamp, but better than Winamp. How to do that ? These guys have been doing this for 10 years now ... Hum... actually, when you think about it, all players are made by programmers, who think like programmers and are great for ... programmers. Still quite usable by non-programmers who are computer literate but a pain in the ass for all normal people who just know how to use internet. And they are a lot of them ! They only browse, check mail, play games, watch pictures and movies. They are not interested, do not have the skills or time, to learn computer inner workings. So after all, improving on Alpha and other players should be quite possible and interesting. Just make it intuitif, easy to use, simple on the surface and elaborate in the inside, making automatic decisions wherever possible. That would be : |
