Arbitrary file types

Hi all,

I don't know if thas has already been posted (I did not find it in the wish list archives), I'd like to see support for arbitrary file types - this relates to my small mikmod-player, which will require support for XM, MOD, 669, IT, etc etc etc.

Maybe another task for that plugin system I heard of...? :)

Till

Please clarify what you're asking for...

The player software can only play specific kinds of files. Right now, that's only MP3 and MP2, and in 2.0 it will add WAV and WMA. There might be a couple of others, but that's pretty much it.

Emplode deliberately does not allow you to drop files onto it if the player can't play that file type. This is to prevent tech support hassles- people calling and wondering why their AVI movies won't play when they drop them onto emplode, for example.

This also has the nice side-effect of allowing you to drop an entire directory structure onto Emplode, spurious files and all, and have it only add the files it can play.

So the fact that Emplode won't accept MOD files is "by design".

HOWEVER...

If you look at the Emptool source code, you can see the bits where they filter for different file types. If you wanted to implement your own loader for your nonstandard file types, it should be pretty easily do-able.

ALSO...

I often use the empeg to taxi large ZIP files between home and work. I do this by faking out emplode: I name the file "Taxi.zip.MP3" and drop it onto emplode. It works. I don't know if that's enough for your plans, but if it is, then you've got a very simple work-around.

___________
Tony Fabris

Hmm, no, I didn't want to go the dirty way of having to rename the tracked songs to MP3s.

I was referring to the rumours of the player software on Empeg getting support for plugins (sometime). This would easily allow for new file types:

-> (3rd party) software to support new files ships with a detection plugin for emplode. Emplode, when accepting files through drap&drop or however, runs through its detection plugins to figure out if the file type is accepted
-> On Empeg, the same thing will happen, just that there's also a player-plugin that will handle the playback of the song

This should be pretty easy to do, the plugins really only need detect() and get_song_info() to return ID3-style information.

Till

Hi.

-> (3rd party) software to support new files ships with a detection plugin for emplode. Emplode, when accepting files through drap&drop or however, runs through its detection plugins to figure out if the file type is accepted
-> On Empeg, the same thing will happen, just that there's also a player-plugin that will handle the playback of the song

You won't need a detection plugin on the empeg, that's the job of the "codec=" line in the *1 FID files. It might be good to make the decoder check the validity of a file first though. (There was a thread about a killer-WAV-file somewhere on this BBS lately, which should be an impossible thing, making the empeg lock up that is.)

cu,
sven

proud MkII owner (12GB blue/green/smoked, #080000113)