Author Topic: I found a jewel of a program: XMplay (Read 40841 times)

urlwolf · « **on:** March 20, 2007, 01:35 PM »

XMPlay (http://www.un4seen.com/) - Old School media formats player (MOD, XM, etc), and all current media formats.

I was thinking to myself:
"I like mediamonkey, but it takes ~10sec to start, uses up ~60mb, and ~20% of the CPU while playing. It'd be niice to have that functionality on a tiny, non-resource-hogging application. Portable if possible".

My idea of a tiny player was evilplayer: reduced in size, but feature poor.

Enter XMPlay. it plays everything with a memory footprint of < 1mb. It has skins, and a library, for the same size of evilplayer. It supports all winamp plugins (for me the Ozone plugin is essential!). It can connect to last.fm. and all that using a few files in a folder, no registry at all, portable and super-compact.

It uses 15 mb when playing stuff through the Ozone plugin (CPU intensive) and about 17% CPU. It pops up immediately, vs 10 sec for MM. All my config comes with me in case I put in in a thumbdrive.

This, gentleman, is beautiful

.

And the sound quality is, to my ears, better than MM (BASS engine).
see
http://fileforum.bet...ew/1011077179/1/view

Oh, and global shortcuts to boot, minizes to tray etc.

You don't see apps this complete and tiny often.

[edited to attach picture]

urlwolf · « **Reply #1 on:** March 20, 2007, 01:53 PM »

Oh, and live search! I've never seen live search with a large music library in any program.

I bought I life-time license for MM... but this is almost sci-Fi

Pros (on top of the previous ones)

supports track and album replay gain!
has an active forum and community
lost of native plugins

Cons:

no album art.
most skins suck (so tiny!) but try the one that mimics i-tunes.
Do not feed a huge lib at once, try small chunks, otherwise it crashes.
Not supported by the default last.fm program (it uses an audioscrobbler plugin)
No "live" changes in mp3 tags, no stars, etc

This program deserves being better known.

Darwin · « **Reply #2 on:** March 21, 2007, 03:33 PM »

I'm sitting in front of my computer grinning like an idiot - I've got Marillion's Kayleigh blasting out of XMPlay and it sounds GREAT - and I'm staring at XMPlay's resource usage in Task Manager. It's sitting solidly at CPU 0-7%/ 4,092 K RAM/ 7,328 K VM. I compared this to the latest versions of WMP 11, iTunes, and Creative MediaSource 5 Player, playing the same mp3 file right after startup and recorded the following:

WMP 2-23%/ 28,108 K RAM/ 597,860 K VM (NOT a typo)
iTunes 9-47%/ 48,260 K RAM/ 41,688 K VM
CMS 5 0-9%/ 36,576 K RAM/ 30,940 K VM

Crazy. As far as my tin ears can tell, the sound quality is the same in each. XMPlay opens intstantly, while the others range from a few seconds (CMS 5) to 30 seconds or so (iTunes).

Just note, I just discovered that CMS 5 has live search as well. Pretty cool!

Thank you, thank you, thank you, urlwolf! I've been hoping to find something more lightweight to play my digital music with and it looks like you've found it. If only it would play iTunes files... Bring on those European court rulings!

TucknDar · « **Reply #3 on:** March 21, 2007, 05:05 PM »

Wow, this is impressive!

maybe I've found a new favourite music player... thanks for posting urlwolf!

Ampa · « **Reply #4 on:** March 22, 2007, 09:11 AM »

Have used this for many years.

The Pros are huge, but it is a one man project and updates are irregular (last major update Dec '05). Some feature requests have been waiting years and not yet seen the light of day.

The community is small too, which means that there is a fairly slow trickle of skins etc, but so long as you are happy with one of the existing ones you will not find such a compact and high quality player anywhere else - try it out!

Ampa

Darwin · « **Reply #5 on:** March 22, 2007, 09:27 AM »

Yeah, I should have added (and meant to do so) that I don't care about skinning and album art - just a feature rich lightweight player.

iphigenie · « **Reply #6 on:** March 22, 2007, 05:49 PM »

I actually dislike skinning - I have windows blinds and I would rather have a program that uses my chosen skin rather than one that has its own skinning system...
I'm not sure why so many programs have their own skinning thingie nowadays, you end up having 5 or 6 different looking apps and it confuses everyone

f0dder · « **Reply #7 on:** March 22, 2007, 05:53 PM »

Yeah, I'm also not a fan of skinning. I can't think of a single application where I've liked it (well, I did have a sevaral-year period where I liked winamp skins, but then I moved to foobar...).

urlwolf · « **Reply #8 on:** March 23, 2007, 07:38 AM »

Have used this for many years.

The Pros are huge, but it is a one man project and updates are irregular (last major update Dec '05). Some feature requests have been waiting years and not yet seen the light of day.

The community is small too, which means that there is a fairly slow trickle of skins etc, but so long as you are happy with one of the existing ones you will not find such a compact and high quality player anywhere else - try it out!

Ampa
-Ampa (March 22, 2007, 09:11 AM)

3.4 is comming out any time now (according to Ian in the forums).
But this program deserves being better known. I just filled a review at download.com. Maybe you should write about/rate it in some other review sites. The larger the community, the more features we'll get. Plus, it is just sad that people are stuck with monstruosities like WMP or itunes, while beaties like this get no attention. Getting this program to be better known is almost a moral obligation

quantumrider · « **Reply #9 on:** March 24, 2007, 01:43 PM »

Darwin: Could you also include the Quintessential Player http://quinnware.com/ in your comparison? I am curious...

I have been using it for some time now, also using it with ozone, I have the monsoon speakers http://www.anandtech.../showdoc.html?i=1011 sadly they are note available anywhere anymore... and with ozone the sound is just great, also they have a link on quinnware site to get the ozone at a discounted price...

please update us on your finding with quintessential player included...

-ark

Darwin · « **Reply #10 on:** March 24, 2007, 03:30 PM »

Hi quantumrider,

I downloaded and installed Quintessential Player - very nice. I rebooted my computer and then fired it up and played an mp3. I recorded CPU usage, RAM usage and VM usage and then repeated with XMPlay playing the same mp3 (Deus' "There is nothing impossible"):

Quintessential: 00-21% CPU/ 9468K RAM/ 21248 K VM
XMPlay: 00-18% CPU/ 6432K RAM/ 6368K VM

Quintessential certainly qualifies as light, particularly in comparison to the other players I tried. It's heavier then XMPlay but does have the advantage of being more intuitive in terms of the layout of its controls. I'm going to to stick with XMPlay for now because I like it, but I'll keep my eyes on Quintessential Player.

brotherS · « **Reply #11 on:** March 24, 2007, 03:45 PM »

XMplay is "OK", I use it on my USB stick. For my PC I still prefer Winamp - it's much, much more customizable (hotkeys! plugins!), and still only uses 2-8% CPU and 12 MB RAM.

See https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=3198.0

PS: I don't understand who *anyone* could only use the Windows MediaPlayer for playback! It's SO BAD!

urlwolf · « **Reply #12 on:** March 24, 2007, 05:29 PM »

Darwin, what is CMS?

I just installed Quintessential to see what sound quality it had. I subjectily compared MM, quintessential and xmplay. All using the default settings in ozone. xmplay sounds best to my ears, by far. Of course, this is just subjective.

Darwin · « **Reply #13 on:** March 24, 2007, 06:00 PM »

urlwolf, I have to agree with you about the sound quality in XMplay. I don't know if it's just the blindness (deafness?) of love (I'm rather smitten with XMplay...), but it sounds crisper and cleaner to me. Anyway, CMS is Creative MediaSource, the player and manager that ships with Creative Soundcards. It's just possible that you can download and install it without having a Creative card installed (I'm not sure). I quite like it, but prefer XMplay because it's so light and quick. I've also managed to install DFx for Winamp (I own a license for the Master Pack for DFx 9) and port it into XMplay, so it sounds better than ever (though on balance, I have to say that its sound quality unaugmented was superb). I've just made XMplay my default player for everything. I'll be interested to see what 3.4 has in store.

jdd · « **Reply #14 on:** March 24, 2007, 07:15 PM »

darwin, would you mind putting my favorite VUPlayer to the comparison test... http://vuplayer? I first learned about it here on DC.

Krazy Hawaiian · « **Reply #15 on:** March 24, 2007, 07:40 PM »

WOW!! After spending half the afternoon fooling with this thing I must admit it ROCKS!!! HARD!

Awesome guys thanks for letting us know about it! Unreal the DSP's for it free.... never see that with any other players...

My comps hooked to a Denon 7.1 HT receiver that is controlling a bank of old 4 SAE tube amps... 5000W RMS+ worth through a SAE mixing board then into 6 Altec surrounds and 4 15 inch JBL Pro woofers in a custom enclosure thats actually my desk.

It literally rips my house apart! Tears the sheetrock off the studs!
XMPlayer is helping things along quite nicely thank you! Especially with that killer bass boost OMG!!

(I worked with JBL designing cabinets for a local sound and stage company, Egg Shell Lighting they put on most of the big shows here. Thats how I got all the big buck goodies, I'd never be able to afford this stuff otherwise. Not living in Hawaii at least!)

Thanks again!

Krazy Hawaiian · « **Reply #16 on:** March 24, 2007, 07:41 PM »

Hell if my motorcycles dont make me deaf this dam stereo system is sure trying LOLz

Sheesh, I came here looking for a fix for URL Snoopers failure to launch and got sidetracked by XMPlayer !!!

least it was fun!!

urlwolf · « **Reply #17 on:** March 24, 2007, 08:25 PM »

darwin, would you mind putting my favorite VUPlayer to the comparison test... http://vuplayer? I first learned about it here on DC.
-jdd (March 24, 2007, 07:15 PM)

vuplayer uses the exact same engine as xmplayer. from their page:

BASS library is copyright © 1999-2007 Ian Luck
http://www.un4seen.com

Darwin · « **Reply #18 on:** March 24, 2007, 10:38 PM »

Two things... first the second one:

Welcome KrazyHawaiian! You've been all over the place here today and no one (that I've seen) has yet given you a big donationcoder welcome, so let me be the first! Hope to see a lot more of you here.

Now for my other point, looks like I'd better start a new thread with my comparisons. I'll try to get things organized and post later tonight or tomorrow.

urlwolf · « **Reply #19 on:** March 25, 2007, 09:34 AM »

Note: mp3toys (the album art powerhouse) uses the BASS engine too. Unfortunately, it doesn't take plugins (no ozone) so I wouldn't use it as a player.

urlwolf · « **Reply #20 on:** March 26, 2007, 05:51 AM »

still, mp3toys doesn't sound as good to my ears.
I think I've found one reason why xmplay may sound better to many of us (at least Darwin, Krazy Hawaiian, and me).

For me is like I can get more detail and get more "into" the music.

Look at the autoamp slider. if it's set to dynamic, you will see how it moves around, increasing the amp in parts where the recording would be pretty much inaudible (try it with classical, with a wide dynamic range, e.g., orchestral stuff).

THis is kind of an alternative solution to replaygain, but while replaygain works as a single tag for the entire file, this autoamp thing changes within a file, and it does the analysis in real time!

(This might save you the trouble -and mapy CPU hours- of running mp3gain on your large collection)
This cannot be as pretty as it sounds, such a simple solution should have been discovered before and mainstream by now.

I'm still investigating this...

f0dder · « **Reply #21 on:** March 26, 2007, 05:59 AM »

such a simple solution should have been discovered before and mainstream by now.
-urlwolf

1) real-time analysis probably isn't all that simple

2) it destroys the intended (or very-bad-mastered, in some cases) dynamics of the track.

I'm personally not that big a fan of the various "audio enhancers", since it makes the music not sound like it intended when it was made.

urlwolf · « **Reply #22 on:** March 26, 2007, 05:42 PM »

2) it destroys the intended (or very-bad-mastered, in some cases) dynamics of the track.

Does that hold for replaygain as well?
If I understand it right, mp3gain (not foobar) writes a tag with volume correction info to each sector (?) of an mp3, whereas foobar just uses one tag for the entire file.
I can attest that mp3gain is slow as hell... close to 20hrs for a measly 8000 tracks.

I agree about the audo enhancers, but changing the overall volume is not that bad.

f0dder · « **Reply #23 on:** March 26, 2007, 05:55 PM »

Well, per-track gain destroys the dynamics if the album was actually mastered, but album gain can be justifiable with albums that were masted way too low (a couple of metallica albums for example, iirc). Per-track gain can be justifiable, though, if the mastering people really screwed up...

I'm going to do the gain-scanning either before or while I convert my wavs to FLAC, so I won't have to decompress-and-scan later on. But I'll still have to do a bit of research on how it all works, especially since I use the somewhat untradtional one wave/flac + cuesheet per album, instead of one file per track.

sri · « **Reply #24 on:** April 15, 2007, 03:37 AM »

How do I get rid of (hide) the bottom window?