Player

What

A little audio player. It uses ffmpeg to decode any file that contains audio data. It plays through ALSA (OSS too, but last time I used the OSS backend was so long ago that I wouldn't bet a turkish lira on it).

Why

You know VLC, don't you?

VLC is:

• big: eats a lot of RAM
• bad: won't open files with non-utf8 characters in their name
• buggy: crashes when you click here and there
• unreliable: insert blanks between audio files, very bad thing
• unpredictable: the equalizer works... sometimes
• unbearable: cuts end of audio files when it feels so
• unstandable: who needs a GUI to play audio files?

So that's why. I just need something to play audio files contained in directories, in the order given in a playlist. VLC just isn't the beast for the task.

I want something that says what file is played, at what position in time, something I can stop as quickly as a ctrl+z, something that has an equalizer tuned to my needs, and also something to bypass silence if I ask it to do so.

That's what I did. That's what you find here.

Where

Here:

• Sep 19, 2015: player-0.7.tar.gz
  fixing the calling of ffmpeg. I think all those years I was in fact NOT using ffmpeg because some trou-du-cul from Debian decided at some point of her craplife that it was perfectly legitimate and aceptable to call "ffmpeg" something that is not ffmpeg. Apparently sanity is back in her brain, or this trou-du-cul left Debian, or whatever politics going on in Debian "won" over the other options or whatever. Who cares?
• Sep 6, 2013: player-0.6.tar.gz
  add a switch to toggle the equalizer on/off (command line argument and signal at runtime).
• Jan 9, 2013: player-0.5.tar.gz
  fix a little bug.
• Jun 27, 2012: player-0.4.tar.gz
  removing silence at beginning and ending of some MP3 files, maybe other stuff too, I don't remember (do a diff if you care).
• Jun 06, 2011: player-0.3.tar.gz
  some bugs fixed (mostly with correct timing display, with this buffer thing you know), better ALSA use, volume up/down via signals, we're coming to something...
• May 10, 2011: player-0.2.tar.gz
  implements a buffer to fight xruns much better, especially between audio files where ffmpeg's stratup time is not so small
  oh, I had a very nasty bug with the ALSA wakeup policy (avail_min for those who understand) with the dmix stuff (I thought this bug was in ALSA, how disappointed to find out it was in my 10 lines of code!) (and something like two weeks' evenings to find it out, what a pity, I'm getting old) (why do I mention that since the bug is not in 0.1? because it was in 0.2-pre and I smoked some brain power on it)
• Apr 26, 2011: player-0.1.tar.gz
  first release, no buffer, very basic but already quiet nice, a good kick in the ass of VLC

How

C code, you need the alsa dev package if you're into these things. Edit the Makefile, some stuff in there is just for me. Lazy me. Just a hack after all... Type 'make' and put 'play' wherever you want.

Then do: ls /some/dir | ./play -
Or: ./play PLAYLIST
And get the stuff in your ears.

You may want to change stuff like removing/setting the equalizer (tuned for my ears, see eq.c, variable eqz_preset_fullbass_10b).

Legal shit

Public domain stuff. Well, I technically stole some code from VLC for the equalizer, so not really public domain. But you know, I am a jerk, a nerd, a punk, so I don't care that much about law.

Contact: sed@free.fr

Created: Tue, 10 May 2011 13:31:17 +0200
Last update: Sat, 19 Sep 2015 19:50:42 +0200