SmallTune

A long time ago, I started to get annoyed by all those fancy blinky stuffy you can find in Winamp. I looked around and didn't find a lightwight alternative. So, again, I used Winamp, but I was somehow - unhappy.

In September 2009, a Thread came up at the german Delphi-PRAXiS.net where someone tried to play a single mp3 by directly accessing DirectSound. So, to make the app as small as possible, I extracted the necessary Interfaces from a textfile which had about 15,000 lines, and ended up by a single 400 line textfile. The final player had just 21k in size, but couldn't do anything special except playing a mp3.

So, lots of ideas came to my mind, and at the end of September 2009, I started writing my own little audioplayer. The main goals were (and still are):

• Small Interface
• Single Playlist
• Easy to use
• Automatic hiding
• Fast
• I mean really fast...
• Play Internetstreams

First, I tried to achive everything by using (and expanding) my little DirectSound Interfaces. But - it was a mess. Switching to the next track took way too long, sometimes the sound cracked. So I decided to switch to BASS.

The BASS-Project is a lib, which offers huge playing capabillities. So I could focus on the UI. With the help of DelphiPRAXiS member "turboPASCAL", I got a pretty nice display. I also implemented a SQL-Database for those of you, who have a really huge file collection.

And now, on October 30, in the year of our Lord 2009, the first version of SmallTune has been released under the GPL v.3

It works under Windows XP, Vista and 7.

But there are still a lot of things to do...