The Multistream ASIO Player
(Last updated 22/Oct/2007 as version 1.05 )
Now supports playlists!
Here is an mp3 player with features not available in any of today’s top players, such as the Windows Media Player, Real Player, Winamp, etc. In the first place, it will play music on professional sound cards via
ASIO, as well supporting all types of sound cards via DirectSound or even the older Window’s multimedia system waveformat audio interface. The desired driver is selectable via the
options menu.
Today you hear of “gapless play” which is supported by several players. The idea is that that one song should follow the next without dropping even one sample between them, so there will be no pause between tracks. However, since most music will have a long fade out at the end, while the next may start with a long fade up, you will still hear a gap of a few seconds between most tracks. The MStream Player, however, allows for “overlapped play”, and is one of the few players that does this. You may choose to overlap the start of the next track with the end of the current track by up to 20 seconds, for a truly gapless “live mix” effect. MStream also allows you to set a fade out of up to 2 seconds for when you skip from one track to the next. When you toggle between Play and Pause, there is a brief built in fade effect.
The MStream Player features a built in
audio test signal generator that permits you to test left and right channels independently with either sweep or sine waves. The selectable musical notes are calculated to such a precision as to become a precise standard reference for the modern Even Tempered Scale to which you can calibrate your equipment and musical instruments. It will also generate a couple of tunes in real-time via the test tone function for testing when you are just setting up and don’t happen to have any music files handy. MStream plays most standard mp3 files and features a unique mp3 file parser for fast and agile seeking. Beyond Window’s wave files, it will also play standard Window’s audio compression formats such as IMA and ADPCM. For more details, see the Readme that comes with the downloaded zip package.
Being a very light-weight application, MStream lacks many features common in today’s players, nor does it have a pretty user interface. It will not play Microsoft's wma format, does not support music with DRM (Digital Restrictions Management), will not play absolutely every mp3 format you can run into these days such as “free bit rate” mp3, will not play your CDs, and will not play 8 bit audio or audio with a sample rate below 22050 samples per second. It is not the goal of MStream to become a typical over-bloated audio player. MStream's reason for being is to demo various DLLs I have available for audio software developers. There are so many players loaded with feature available today, that there is no point in trying to add yet another to the mix. However, MStream should be more than adequate for playing quality music and may grow and evolve depending on the level of interest. You may miss the unique features it does support when you go back to your previous player. In keeping with being fast loading and ultra light-weight, nothing is installed and nothing is added to your Window's registery. Please give me your feedback about how well this works out for you and your opinion on what should be the most important feature to add next.
What's new in version 1.04...
With version 1.04 we now have the capability of loading play lists of the form "MyPlayList.m3u", such as created via Winamp or other play list editors. To load a play list, click on the Browse button in MultiStream Player, and near the bottom of the resulting Open File Dialog, where it says "File types", select "Play list". Suddenly all files of type .m3u will become visible, and you may select as many as you wish to load at one time.
Beyond this, we have another new capability, and that is the ability to employ the MultiStream Player as the default player for your system. When MultiStream Player is set as the default player (see the Readme), you may now double click on music files in Windows Explorer, and MultiStream Player should pop up and play them. It opens much faster than other players when doing this - very useful for previewing songs. MultiStream Player will now also work as the external player in file organizers such as "MP3Toys".
What's new in version 1.05...
Version 1.05 is mainly a bug fix version. Though mp3s at 32,000 samples per second resolution are not supported, it was discovered that if such a file was loaded inadvertently it would crash the application. That is now fixed so that such a file will merely play at the wrong speed (44.1 K sample per second) and no longer crash. See the Readme for more about this version.
