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I've been looking at this and I like the idea of custom info views. I don't know if I like the fact that it slows down the visuals, mainly because that tells me that all things will run/react slower. Is that because of the lyric part of the program or something else? How bad is the slow down? I'm not trying to complain, I just would hate to slow down the player.


Er, I dunno, why don't you give it a shot for yourself? If the slowdown is unacceptable to you, then you're under no obligation to continue using it. And it's not like it's costing you anything!

Seriously though, I won't even make an attempt to quantify or qualify the slowdown, because it all depends on what else is going on with your player, what player version you're using, how much RAM you have, what model player you have, what other apps might be running... Way too many variables.

What I will tell you is that I use emphatic full time now on both of my players and the only time I see slowdowns is when the player is going to disk to fill its cache. When that happens, ALL bets are off when it comes to 3rd party apps, because disk I/O is CPU-bound and nothing else gets ANY CPU when the player decides to read from disk. There's really nothing I can do about that.

Other people have reported varying degrees of slowdown. It certainly will depend on what emphatic is doing at the time, but the lyric display code is no more or less complex/CPU-intensive than the code for drawing the other display elements (artist, title, etc.) As mentioned elsewhere in this and other threads, the most CPU-intensive thing is the "burnin" function which puts a dark outline around the text for busy visuals. I do intend to try to optimize that code further, but for now, it is what it is, and I think it's still very usable.

Ultimately, you're going to have to install it for yourself and see how things go. If you don't like what you see, take out the EXEC_ONCE entry that launches emphatic and you've got the regular player UI back.

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So how custom can I get with this?



Again, install the program and try out the sample display modes. Those should give you an idea of how custom you can get.

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Any plans on say a GUI to create the custom looks? You know to help lazy peeps like my self.



I've thought about a GUI, but I've got bigger fish to fry, and GUI programming isn't my area of expertise. If someone else wanted to do one, I'd definitely help them on their way, though.
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- Tony C
my empeg stuff