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 RISC OS 

AMPlay 2.00a

AMPlay is a desktop player for MP3 music files, using the AMPlayer module.

Features
What's New
Known Bugs and limitations
Requirements
License
Download
Beta
Documentation

It contains a number of features specifically aimed at dealing with very large collections of MP3s ('large' in this context is many thousands).

Main Features:

	Understanding that an MP3 collection is not just a flat list of files, but can be treated as a heirarchy - each track comes from an album (a collection of tracks in the general sense), which in turn is by an artist. AMPlay will work this out automatically.
	Highly scalable. Tested up to 25,000 tracks in the database, with no problems. Should go to at least 100,000 before configuration needs changing (dynamic area maximum size). The database grows as needed, and is intelligent about recalculating only what is needed.
	Support for filtering out sections of the database by artist, album, or specific track. These filters can be saved and reloaded as required. Up to 20 filters can be stored within AMPlay, and multiple filters can be active concurrently. Filtering is sensitive to the playback order (see below) in that you can tell AMPlay only to play certain tracks if they are being played in order, as part of the entire album they belong to. You can also indicate that certain tracks should only be played in isolation (i.e. only in random track mode)
	Completely flexible playback order. AMPlay can choose artists, albums or tracks at random or in database order. Albums within artists, and tracks within albums or artists can be shuffled. There is also a chaos mode where the playback order itself is randomised.
	Mini version of main window. Either the mini or main windows can be set to "always on top".
	History of tracks, albums and artists played.
	Support for jumping directly to a particular artist, album or specific track.
	Track, album or artist repeat.
	Link to Next capability to allow you to tell it to treat a sequence of tracks, albums or artists as a single unit, and not to split them up when playing in random order or while shuffling.
	Ignore Uniqueness. This is a flag that can be set per-track, album or artist, and indicates that AMPlay should not bother checking whether it has been played recently. ('Recently' is also configurable)
	Relative Track Volume can be set on any track to compensate for particularly loud or quiet tracks.
	Random weighting adjustment. A weighting can be applied to tracks, albums or artists, to influence the random item picker for or against the item in question..
	Support for sequence files to play files from the database in a specified order while keeping the database grouped into albums and artists.
	Search interface allowing you to apply a range of actions to tracks, albums or artists matching particular criteria.
	Save state - remeber window positions etc.
	Ability to scan a directory structure for MP3 to add to the database.
	Customisable main window buttons to launch other MP3 related applications (e.g. equaliser, visualisation etc).
	Customisable icon bar icon actions.
	Block menus for dealing with menus that could potentially contain many thousands of items (it displays them in blocks of configurable length)
	Programmer's API to allow AMPlay to be controlled by other programs, or remotely.
	Utilities to control AMPlay from the command line, or from another machine.

What's New:

2.00a is a bugfix release, fixing the following issues in 2.00;

	Sort would crash if asked to sort a database of only 1 track. (It now displays a message in the main window to the effect that it cannot sort a single track.)
	Double-clicking MP3 files did not add them to the database.
	After adding the first track to the database, clicking Play did not start that track playing (but clicking next did).
	The !Run file of AMPlay and the accompanying apps and utilities gave an error if ABCLib or (in some cases) CallASWI was not already loaded.
	Removal of items from the database could create some oddities in the history. Specifically, some tracks would be (correctly) present in the history, but the flags on those tracks would not have the 'in history' bit set. This would lead to them possibly being picked even if played recently, but would have no serious effects.
	AMPlayCfg generated an error if run without AMPlay having been seen by the filer. This was because AMPlay contains the default skin directory, which AMPlayCfg needs to iterate to build the menu of available skins. It now greys out the whole skins section if is undefined, or points to a 1.X version of AMPlay.
	AMPlayCfg was appending a couple of extra lines to the options file each time the options were saved. It also now does not allow the same parameter to occur more than once in the file.
	Some other minor issues (incorrect button greying etc), as noted in the changelog (in the documentation).

Note that there are changes to AMPlay, AMPlayCfg, and all the utility apps.

The information for 2.00 is still relevant;

2.00 is a complete rewrite, in BASIC, using the DrWimp library.

It is compiled using Castle's ABC compiler. Uncompiled source is also available.

Many of things that are new are also listed in the main features section, above.

	26/32 bit neutral. No reliance on Aemulor. No reliance on WBModule. Tested on RISC OS 5.09 and 4.37 (but should work on 3.7 and later).
	Much better null poll behaviour (no longer causes unnecessary CPU load
	Much improved perfomance in most areas.
	No maxima. The database grows as needed and is much more scalable than previously.
	Much improved database efficiency, both in terms of time spent recalculating information, and in memory usage. Now works out what information needs recalculating rather than recalculating everything.
	Naming options (pathname or tag) can now be set on a per-track basis rather than being a global option.
	Naming details can be editted within AMPlay. Edits can take place at the track, album or artist level. There are also options to save naming information back to the tags.
	Much improved search capabilities
	Much improved export capabilities
	Extended filter functionality. Now up to 20 filters available, with more useful states. Multiple filters may be active concurrently.
	Much extended playback order options.
	Redesigned database editor showing all the settings for each track, album or artist.
	Track, album or artist repeat.
	Ignore uniqueness.
	Linkage, and weighting can now be set at the album or artist level, not just on tracks. (The ability to have persistent settings at all on albums or artists is new in 2.00)
	Sorting improved. Now much less dependant on how unsorted the database is.
	Internationalisation support. (Although only UK resources provided at present)
	Interactive help on menu items as well as icons.
	Extra sort options to make it insensitive to spaces and hardspaces. Also option to ignore leading 'The' on artist names (i.e. treat 'The Offspring' and 'Offspring' as identical, filing both under 'O'.) The boundary checking routines that determine where albums and artists start and end uses the same options of case, space and ignore the.
	Basic skinning support.
	Extended functionality in AMPlayCmd
	Extended functionality in AMPlayRCG (formerly called AMPlayRC)

For more information, refer to the main AMPlay documentation, currently available only in plain text. A HTML version of the documentation should be available shortly.

Known Bugs/Limitations:

The following are bugs discovered since release, and are not documented elsewhere;

The pause button on the mini-version of the player window doesn't highlight when the track is paused (This is actually an error in the templates file in the default skin, not a fault in the code.)

The following are covered in the documentation;

AMPlay 2.00 will only upgrade from the saved state and database of AMPlay 1.5x. AMPlay 1.5x also needs to have had the 'binary state format' option enabled (which it was by default). AMPlay 2.00 cannot load the states of earlier versions.

Changing panes in the database editor or AMPlayCfg causes it to jump to the front.

There is some obscure combination of circumstances, generally involving playing external tracks (i.e. AMPlay is displaying info about a track that isn't in its database) which results in the fast forward and rewind buttons being greyed out when they shouldn't be. I've seen this several times, but been utterly unable to reproduce it when monitoring the exact sequence of steps. If you see this, pausing and unpausing will clear it. If you can work out what you did to cause it, please let me know . . .

There have been some instances where operations that start a different track playing (Next, Forcenext, Previous Album, etc) fail to unpause. i.e. You're on one track, paused. Clicking next takes you to another track, but it starts paused on the new track. Most instances of this are fixed, but one known one remains - clicking next during the locate within track that occurs during startup (if the option to remember position within track is set).

Operations (pause, play etc) that take place while AMPlay is in the process of changing from one track to the next may be ignored.

Requirements:

AMPlay requires;

	RISC OS version 3.7 or later. It is 26/32bit neutral.
	Enough processing power for the AMPlayer module to decode MP3s in realtime at sufficient quality. In practice, this makes a StrongARM RiscPC the minimum spec for most people, although the faster ARM7500FE based machines might just about suffice with some tweaking of the AMPlayer options.

AMPlay also requires the following modules;

	AMPlayer 1.39 or later. By Thomas Olsson, Justin Fletcher and Robin Watts. For 32-bit systems, download the unofficial 1.39 build, unless a later official build exists.
	ABCLibrary 4.15 or later. You may well already have this, if not, refer to the linked page. A copy of this is included with AMPlay, but may not be the latest version.
	CallASWI 0.03 or later. You may well already have this, if not, refer to the !System updates section in the linked page.
	AcornURI 0.12 or later. AMPlay will work without this - it just uses it for the email and web buttons on the program information window.

License:

AMPlay is freeware.

The AMPlay source has its own license information covering what uses can be made of it.

License details are included in the downloads, but are also available here;

AMPlay License.
AMPlay Source License.

AMPlay is built using the DrWimp library. For more details on this, refer to; http://www.rayfavre.me.uk/drwimp.html

Download:

Complete Packages

	AMPlay 2.00a. Complete Application and Text Documentation, including AMPlayCfg 2.00a (760 KB zip file)
	AMPlay 2.00a Source. Includes source for AMPlayCfg, and all the utilities. (698 KB zip file)
	AMPlay Utilities. AMPlayRCG (Remote Control Gateway), Simple client for AMPlayRCG, AMPlayAPI test app (87 KB zip file)
	Static link to the latest version. http://www.mikejs.com/riscos/amplay/amplay_latest.zip will always contain the latest version of AMPlay. Link to this if you want a non-version dependant link. Currently, it's just a copy of the AMPlay 2.00a archive, listed above.
	Previous versions of AMPlay.

Updates from 2.00 to 2.00a

These only contain the changed files and are not complete applications.

	AMPlay 2.00a Update. Update AMPlay and AMPlayCfg from 2.00 to 200a (380 KB zip file)
	AMPlay 2.00a Source Update. Update source files for AMPlay, AMPlayCfg. (217 KB zip file)
	AMPlay Utilities Update. Updated files for AMPlayRCG and AMPlayAPI (8 KB zip file)

Beta:

This section is for downloading AMPlay beta versions or patches.

No beta versions are currently available.

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