WMDIMP 0.3 review
DownloadWMDIMP is a digital music player applet
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WMDIMP is a digital music player applet. In other words, it can play your favourite mp3s in background while you're working or doing something else, being always visible and handy.
It's an applet because its small and simple GUI is just 64 x 64 pixel wide, designed to fit into your WindowMaker's dock or AfterStep's wharf, or other window manager's equivalent (if they support window swallowing). If being ran as a normal application, it runs as a shaped 64x64 pixel window. At the moment, it's tested only under linux/ix86, but it might run on other systems and architectures too (and I'd like to know if someone tries).
It has been reported not to compile under freebsd :((, but I don't have any way to try and fix it on systems other than linux; if someone wants to help, send me a mail.
It is derived from another small player, wmmp3, by Patrick Crosby, which I used as a starting point. Anyway, wmdimp has gone far away, and now almost all the main code is written from scratch by me.
Here are some key features of "WMDIMP":
It's small, simple, and very handy.
It doesn't depend on the presence of other external players, this way having more control over the whole playback (it uses the libmad library). On the contrary, if you like it to be just a shell over mpg123 without having to install the libmad library, you can do this too.
It plays high quality audio (using the internal player), since it gets a 28 bit stream from libmad and, if your card cannot play 32bit streams directly, it scales it to 16 bit with dithering and noise shaping.
It's very lightweight, it uses low memory and cpu power.
It has a fairly good buffering system to avoid clicks under heavy load (if you use mpg123 to play your files, this is not always true and depends on mpg123).
It has many useful features, such as random order play, repeat album or switch to the next, skip unavailable directories, ecc.
It will play many strange or corrupted files, as long as they contain some valid mp3 data.
It's skinnable (only compile-time, run-time skin switching is coming).
It can play ogg vorbis, and in the future, it will play other formats, such as wav or flac, and it may use other sound systems than OSS (alsa, artsd, esd, ...), or maybe anything else (just ask me).
Last but not least, it's free and covered by the GPL!
What's New in This Release:
ID3 support with the internal mp3 player.
Many bugs fixed, now segmentation faults and deadlocks should be very unfrequent (if they actually show up).
Better buffering ==> lower cpu usage (with the internal mp3 player)
Little change in push buttons behaviour: action is taken on mouse button release instead of press (except pause/play and toggles).
WMDIMP 0.3 keywords