Home Page Forums Other Emulator Message Boards Audio Overload Not quite AO, but...

I think you're getting a little too harsh here. Of course "normal" music players don't offer as much options as a pure VGM player might, but most people just want a jukebox and nothing more. Sure, multi-track NSF or SID files (hey, I just found another thing AO ought to play one day j/k) are pretty hard to seamlessly integrate into a playlist, but as long as I can put everything into a big 80GB shuffle I don't mind any potential loss of control. Okay, maybe some basic tag reading/editing functionality might be cool - which will probably involve a lot of TagLib hacking...

Somehow I came to like the all-in-one philosphy quite a lot (MAME, Mednafen, Winamp). Vista, however, is more of a too-much-crap-I-don't-need-but-can't-remove-in-one experience - which is one of the reasons why I switched to Linux. Of course the one-app-for-one-task mentality is good in order to keep devs focused when fixing stuff, but you know what the very same people tend to do to vi/Emacs in order to not leave their beloved text editor when browsing or doing their laundry.

hey, you suggested audio first my original 5 suggestions would make AO perfect for chiptunes, at least for me

audio does pave the way for that all in one mentality, even if it materialises in 10 years.

other players are built for audio, chiptunes are an afterthought so it's indeed pushing something big through a hole, but AO has it the other way around - it can perfect chiptunes in a way others can't while casually adding audio one day to make it whole lol.

I actually don't consider MAME or Mednafen to be all-in-one in that same way. There's no equivalent to NSF/SID where the paradigm completely changes.

My understanding of the rules for MP3 support is that one needs a rather expensive license to do, at least officially. Though perhaps it has changed?

Yup, bad example, but I know what you were pointing at.


I didn't quite understand that sentence...

Richard: decoding is free if you aren't charging for the app, but that doesn't clear the patent situation (which is why e.g. Red Hat won't ship anything MPEG). M1's had a decoder for ages for those Sega Digital Sound Board games.

F-3582: multiple songs per game. It's why every attempt to play those formats in Winamp is a giant kludge. There's no equivalent to that in MAME (although MESS has similar issues).

Kay. Well, ideally the plug-in would list all those sub-songs as separate tracks. Which would require some serious pre-processing when adding lots of such files to a playlist... And of course, you would once again need a special tagging format that declared the song length for every single one of them...

would it be possible to display such multi track formats like NSF as separate tracks in the playlist? it sounds natural, yet does any player currently do this? that might open up whole new levels of usability.

imagine someday being able to only include selected NSF tracks in your playlist

Apparently one of the Japanese players has a convention where .KSS files are in a zip with a same-named .M3U and the m3u file "tags" the tracks inside the KSS. I'd like to support that and extend it to NSF - that way the tagged tracks would appear in the playlist.

That would require some core work though. Richard, you game?

Nezplug supports those for all it's formats (NSF/GBS/KSS/HES).
I like XMPlay's SID plugin take on this. Treating the whole song as a single file, showing the subsong info in the info panel, and the ability to skip between subsongs with right-click on the prev/next button.