bplay 0.991 review

bplay is a buffered sound player and recorder for Linux. bplay-0.991 is the current stable version

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: David Monro

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bplay is a buffered sound player and recorder for Linux.

bplay-0.991 is the current stable version. No development work is continuing on this branch of the code, but occasional maintenance releases may be made from this branch.

bplay2 is currently in development. The is a complete and radical rewrite of the original code. Major differences include:

Replaced multiple processes using SYSV shared memory and semaphores with a single multithreaded process (when bplay was first written, Linux didn't really have threads).
Support for transforming audio formats on the fly allows playing of file formats not supported by the hardware in the machine (eg copes with byte-swapped or floating-point formats).
A more modular approach to file format interpretation.
Code now should work on big-endian machines properly (when bplay was first written, x86 was the only architecture supported under Linux).


Currently there is no downloadable version of bplay2 - the code is still in too much of a mess. In particular I need to merge some endian fixes into the code, and I've also decided to rearrange the source a little to allow adding of non-OSS platforms (AIX is likely to be the first such platform at this stage). I also need to make the code 64-bit clean somehow, which will involve writing some sort of test harness for all of the conversion code since the only 64-bit machine I have access to has no sound hardware.