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XMPlay is great for tracker modules (.MOD, .XM, .S3M) and even supports MO3 format (tracker music format with high quality samples). It uses BASS library for playback which is quite accurate in replaying these formats in terms of timing and effects.

Another great player is AIMP. Similar to the old versions of WinAmp, but it has a live stream recording feature included.

Moved to XMPlay years ago. Never going back.

My player of choice is foobar2000. No other player comes remotely close to the amount of customisation and efficiency. That said, it's really meant for experts. For tech noobs, I recommend XMPlay, which has a very Winamp-like interface out of the box, but supports many more formats or 1by1 for a very straightforward, no frills player.

XMMS is a decroded piece of ugly shit. A blatant rip off of Winamp that has long since been discontinued. XMPlay destroys them all.

XMPlay

So use XMPlay and stop crying like a little bitch.

Grab yourself :
- Qt http://qt-project.org/
- Bass API http://www.un4seen.com/bass.ht...

Get coding. Make it a simple MP3 player, or, expand on it until your hearts content.

Qt is great for making quick apps and learning a bit of C++ in the process.
The rest of time, you'll be learning "Qt functions", not a bad thing, as it pretty much contains everything you'll need to make a cross platform GUI program. Qt is quick to learn, very simple compared to most things out there.

If you prefer Visual Studio, or prefer more of a challange (and care about resource use of your program), use that with C++ and MFC, or C if you like.

Think simple, start simple then expand on your project if your enjoying it. This way, you'll learn quicker and get satisfaction out of doing it.

Best of luck.

288kb of optimized, "true to original" playback.
http://www.un4seen.com/

Only downside? No scaling options for dpi :(.

A bloated player made by Russians? No thank you. XMPlay for me.

A 7.36 meg download for a music player developed by Russians? No thanks! I'll stick with XMplay (334k).

If you're looking for lightweight on Windows, check out xmplay. It's sitting at 334.4k. Sounds good, supports a lot of formats, has plugins, skinnable, integrates into your context menu if you want...

Not affiliated with them but I've used their program happily for years now.

http://www.un4seen.com/

I used to be a diehard Winamp user, back from the pre v1 days to the early days of v5. It just got so slow and bloated that I eventually gave it up. Apparently Winamp users care more about how their player looks than how it sounds and responds.

Songbird sucks boulders through crazy straws. I tried it once before and have absolutely nothing positive to say about it.

foobar2000 is my main player. I've been using it to manage and play my music library/large playlists for the past few years and absolutely love it. It's fast, small memory/CPU footprint, supports almost every known audio format, has just about any audio/DSP feature/filter that can be named, ReplayGain support, nice masstagger/renamer and a highly customizable interface via its own internal scripting language, ColumnsUI or PanelsUI. In my opinion there is no other player that even comes close.

Xion is what I use for quick individual sound files or small playlists. It's quite a nice, fast loading little player.

XMPlay is decent, but is a little too slow loading once you get the file format and DSP plugins installed. It boasts "balls-on" accurate MOD/XM/etc playback, but really many other players can handle these formats just as accurately.

CoolPlayer is a neat little player, but doesn't really offer much, aside from being open source. It has limited format support and not many features.

uAmp has the distinction of being an x64 player, but offers little else. It's slow loading, supports even fewer formats than CoolPlayer and has doesn't even have rudimentary features that many other players have (ie. equalizer, noise shaping, gapless playback, etc).

1by1 is actually a pretty cool little player. It supports few file formats standalone, but does support Winamp input plugins for more. The main feature is its interface which directly uses directories instead of playlists.

coverJuke is basically a coverFlow clone. It has a slick OpenGL interface, supports a moderate number of file formats (can support more by using an external player) and is actively developed. Still considering that foobar2000 has a coverFlow-like plugin for it (if that's your thing), this player doesn't have much more than novelty value.

musikCube is a nice lightweight player with a respectable number of features. I think of it as foobar-lite, except it's really not any faster and has significantly less features and format support.

iTunes is slow, bloated, supports a laughably small number of formats and is lacking in features. I tried it once and it proceeded to start renaming my meticulously named, tagged and ordered music library on its own. Purged it from my system and had to use foobar2000 to repair the damage that it did. In short, it's complete crap.

Aqualung looks promising, but I haven't actually gotten around to trying it out.

I'm not sure about iPod support for any of these since I use a Creative Zen which acts as an external drive when plugged in, making it really easy to copy to/from.

Your mod file example is great. It's a now archaic format which is no longer in vogue.

Fortunately the LPT port nonsense was a hardware specific nonsense completely independent of the format, and open source code which can reproduce the music on any modern platform is readily available. http://mikmod.raphnet.net/ http://www.modplug.com/ (sourcecode for modplug is availble, believe it or not)

There are also closed solutions: http://www.un4seen.com/

And there are industry standard sound libraries that do the job fine: http://www.fmod.org/

So, it seems that these antiquated technologies (mod dates to 1987) tend to get supported just fine.

Speaking of which. I stumbled upon MO3, which is basically a mod, with samples compressed with mp3. Quite fun stuff was made with this, and still around 100ish kbytes.

if you want a simplistic audio player, you could try http://www.un4seen.com/xmplay.html/

Here's an example:
http://www.un4seen.com/download.php?6chan

You can convert Dolby AC3 from DVDs into 5.1 channel OGG Vorbis streams to make DVD rips but it doesn't save you much bandwidth since AC3 is only 192kbps to begin with (can you believe it?)

I have a really nice OGG of the THX intro sound in 5.1 which sounds _much better_ than the AC3 version because of the higher bitrate ceiling. If I can find it I'll reply with a post to a link.

My fav player is xmplay - http://www.un4seen.com/
Lightweight, assignable hotkeys for everything, super-accurate support for old MOD formats, and more.
sadly it's Windows only...

This actually brings up a very good point relating to TFA and preserving accuracy: Mikmod seems to be the standard library for tracked music, with Modplug libraries a close second. The problem is that neither of them is entirely faithful to some formats, Impulse Tracker files in particular. It gets the point across OK but there are sometimes very obvious differences between the songs as played in Impulse Tracker and one of these other players.

The only software I know which is meant for modern computers that does a 100% accurate job is XMPlay http://www.un4seen.com/ which is sadly windows-only. Though there is an XMMS plugin.

XMPlay plays Modules well enough... and IFF Pro does a good job of conversion... the tools will always be there, you just gotta find them

I prefer XMPlay. It is very small and fast. It also has great quality playback. Works with OGG and PLS and plays streams well and is very stable. My only minor complaint is that the default theme doesn't look that good but that was easily fixed.

We've used Python in a few projects, from a relatively simple action/puzzle game, TapDown, to a larger, multi-user game. As jericho4.0 points out, it binds well with C, so for both projects, we wrote C/Python binders for the Fastgraph graphics library and the BASS audio library. I find that it's much easier to prototype in Python than in C, so, for example, when we wanted to implement a modified Perlin Noise algorithm for the larger project, we modelled it in Python first, then optimized the processor-consuming bits by implementing them in C.

I'd jump at the chance to use Python as a the scripting language in a first-person shooter. The Conitec engine uses something called C-Script, which is nice, but not nearly as sexy as Python is. Some drawbacks come to mind, (just off the top of my head, it may be tricky to have an entity sit around in the middle of its script), but its ease-of-use, combined with the simplicity of dropping down to C for the lower-level stuff makes it very appealing for all sorts of games.
_________________________________________________
Inago Rage - Create, fight, and fly in a first-person shooter.

I think the big question is, how can we get small game studios back? Is it really not possible for a small team to make commercial games?

I believe that the problem smaller studios face can be overcome with some lateral thinking. The problem is two-fold: production costs and marketing costs are too high to allow indies to compete on equal footing with the big boys. The solution, then, is to not compete on equal footing.

Don't: Try to copy a game that took 60 people 3 years to create.
Do: Draw from an existing genre, but come up with a unique twist -- something meaty that doesn't exist elsewhere.

Don't: Compete with larger productions on the same style of graphics.
Do: Come up with a unique look; it's easier to wow people with a fresh style. (Though Monolith is not a small studio, Tron 2.0 was the opposite of the hyper-realism trend, and set itself apart on appearance, among other things.)

Don't: Try to out-advertise Activision, Microsoft, or Infogr- er- Atari. A small studio's meager advertising budget should be used towards development.
Do: Make as much use of word-of-mouth marketing as is humanly possible. It's easier to connect with your individual players because... well... there are fewer of them.

Don't: Re-invent the wheel. id Software must create its own 3D engine from scratch; you don't (necessarily) have to.
Do: Make as much use of middleware as possible. You don't need to be an artist to create skycubes. You don't need to know DirectX or OpenGL intimately to create an engine. You don't need to write your audio engine from scratch.

And I deeply believe better games would be coming out of a smaller and more laid back studio...

I like the cut of your jib. I hope you're right.

________________________
Inago Rage - A first-person shooter where you fight in arenas of your own creation.

I can't go around installing shit on everyone's PC no can I.
There are plenty of players out there that do not need installing and support OGG, MP3, etc... XMPlay for one (it will even play WMA if needed)... It'll happily run from yer portable HD and play every track on there...

...when the best open-source *nix audio players (mpg321 & ogg123, of course) will get their skinning enabled?

P.S. By the way, I might suggest that you, the ones still using WinAMP, to start migrating to the more compact (both on the HDD & in RAM), free (as in ``free beer''), almost-equally-featured (expect for the auto-execution of the skinning scripts, emphatically...) and, what really matters, not as baroque, state-of-the-art universal audio players for the win32 & compatibles (and, by using WINE, under the GNU/Linux too), - ``XMPlay'', see http://www.un4seen.com || Alternately, use the open-source, quite reach featured and cross-platform ``Zinf'' (ex-FreeA*p) - http://zinf.org

P.P.S. Or, quite a way better, stop listening to digitized music at all, mha-ha-ha! ;-)

Well, if size is a problem, how about XMplay?
Its a tiny exicutable file, and it even has a winamp skin if you like that look. Plays pretty much any music media type. I use it, though I have to admit that it doesn't enhance the sound quality like Media Jukebox or anything, though I do enjoy the custom keyboard hotkeys that work even if it isn't the active application. alt-space = pause/play. woo.

XMplay

Time to give some of the other players a try, methinks...

try xmplay (win32, 297kb). it's under active development (ian is really responsive to user requests/bug reports) and supports:

- ogg, mp3, mp2, mp1, wma, wav, mo3 (ogg or mp3 compressed module music), it, xm, s3m, mtm, mod, umx, and sid (via an input plugin)
- skinnable
- html url scanning

for the linux crew, try it's alpha xmms plugin. :)

- p

Time to give some of the other players a try, methinks...

try xmplay (win32, 297kb). it's under active development (ian is really responsive to user requests/bug reports) and supports:

- ogg, mp3, mp2, mp1, wma, wav, mo3 (ogg or mp3 compressed module music), it, xm, s3m, mtm, mod, umx, and sid (via an input plugin)
- skinnable
- html url scanning

for the linux crew, try it's alpha xmms plugin. :)

- p

What do you mean exactly by "Full advantage of my SB Live"?

MODs (by which I mean the whole spectrum of MOD, XM, S3M, MKM, IT MT2, etc, etc) aren't like GM MIDI files - the playback quality isn't particularly dependant on your hardware. MODs are more akin to MP3, in that it's playing back samples. The difference is that while an MP3 is just one great big long sample, a MOD is a collection of sample "instruments" along with instructions on how to play them back.

Anyways, assuming you're running Windows, XM Play is by far the best MOD player. It's free, and WAY surpasses Winamp's lousy MOD support. Plus you can get plugins to play just about anything in XMPlay, from zipped wavs to NES or C=64 musicdata rips

The first thing you'll need to to is learn a programming language and get familiar with it's development tools on your platform of choice, be it Linux, Windows or MacOS. You don't need to master the language as demos do not always need the most advanced features that some languages offer (such as multiple inheritance, etc). At first, writing 'hello world' -programs and such may be quite boring and frustrating but have patience - eventually you'll see that the skills you've learned will prove useful. A final word regarding the language; In the old days all demos were written in pure assembly language but these days C++ is the one most coders use and would be smart choice to learn. A good book on C++ is a way to get started.

Once you're comfortable with the language and it's tools, the next step is to learn more about your computer works. You'll need to know how to control the hardware; graphics card, sound card, timers and such. In modern operating systems this means studying the application programming interfaces (APIs) that the operating system provides. Fortunately, there are plenty of good tutorials that teach how to, for example, display graphics using OpenGL or DirectX. There are also many good libraries (Bass, FMOD, etc) for playing different audio files and you'll find them to be quite useful when adding music to your demo productions. Most people use their own timing system but there are some timeline editors such as Demopaja which may ease the work.

Now that you know the language and how to control your computer, you'll need to know how to code effects. Learning the math behind 3D graphics is quite useful, as is knowing how to manipulate bitmaps with convolution matrices and filters. Don't be afraid of math - it's a very useful tool and a key to understanding how effects really work. The internet is full of information on how to code different effects and functional examples to experiment with. Watch a lot of demos and try to figure out what effects they use and how they are are made. Read magazines, look at pictures in them and try to imagine how they would look animated. Look around when walking in a city or in nature - think of ways how to model things in the real world. Experiment with your code - quite many effects have been found by accident when experimenting. Chat with other demosceners on the net, maybe even meet them in real life at parties. Friendship is an important part of demoscene and discussing ideas with other people will often spring new ones. Code alone doesn't make a demo and you'll need find friends who can make music, paint pictures or create 3d models.

Don't feel overwhelmed by everything that you need to learn and do. If you can find the right frame of mind, you'll endure through the tedious basics of programming - see it as a challenge. After a lot of work, seeing your own effect work is a very gratifying experience. Once you know the basics, the possibilities are endless. Above all, the most important thing is to have fun.

Some links:
NeHe's OpenGL tutorials
Andy Pike's DX8 tutorials
Bass
FMOD
M0ppi Demopaja