BMPx 0.36.1 review
DownloadBMPx is a media player based on the XMMS multimedia player software
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BMPx is a media player based on the XMMS multimedia player software. Its primary goals are usability and usage of current desktop standards.
BMPx is the codename for the next-generation BMP. It will not differ very much from the current BMP, except that the code has been rewritten 95% from scratch, including the skinning engine and the playback backend (a few utility functions and miscellaneous stuff has been taken from the old codebase).
Here are some key features of "BMPx":
Support for multiple playlists
BMPx can keep several playlists at the same time loaded, and you can switch between them at any time and play songs from them.
GUI-Less player
BMPx is actually a gui-less player. It can function completely without GUI and is as such a fully functional audio player with the same capabilities that the UI provides (in other words, the UI doesn't provide any capabilities that the core player doesn't have). However, it currently uses a Winamp2.x-skin compatible skinning engine (rewritten from scratch, not based on the XMMS engine), which is not a seperate process communicating via DBus, but compiled in. Our reasoning for this is that we don't want to be 'faceless', a main GUI should always be readily available. Just so you get an idea what is meant by GUI-less: It would take maybe 15 minutes with VI to create a fully building and working BMPx source tree without the GUI, which you could then control through DBus.
Daemonized running and DBus control
BMPx can, as already stated above, run as a daemon process, in which the UI is not initialized at all. It's not simply hidden, it's just not initialized, so there are also no resources being wasted. The core player code is 100% UI-independent. When running in daemon mode, no "helper" UI subsystems need to be initialized for the player to run.
The player can be controlled through DBus in a very fine grained manner which goes far beyond what was possible in BMP (or XMMS for that matter). Basically, it allows to run BMPx as a playback backend and attach a different GUI trough DBus to it. This is comparable to MPD (http://www.musicpd.org/).
Metadata cache/Media library
BMPx has a metadata caching system that will cache the metadata for files that have been at least once added to a playlist. Optionally you can pre-load the metadata cache with a path on the filesystem (recursively). By doing this, you basically turn the cache into a media library, and BMPx does provide facilities to use the cache as a library.
Never the less, this system is more of a metadata cache rather than a media library, and hence control over it isn't as fine-grained as in e.g. Rhythmbox or iTunes, where you can dedicatedly add or remove paths to/from the library. But despite of this fact it is very usable and the current UI that allows you to access the cache as a library is very effective.
Requirements:
GTK 2.7.x or 2.8 ([1] (http://www.gtk.org/))
Cairo 0.9.0 or better
Taglib 1.3.1 or better
XINE 1.0.1 or better ([[2] (http://www.xinehq.de/)) *OR* GStreamer 0.9.1 or better ([3] (http://www.gstreamer.net/))
Libglade 2.5.1 or better
FAM (This will be changed to use Gamin instead in the future)
Dbus 0.35 or better
What's New in This Release:
bug fixes
BMPx 0.36.1 keywords