Re: coding our own playmodes at the moment

To my knowledge, currently empeg does not want to make the source
available to the player, because this is what they are good at, and
so this is how they make their money. That's fair enough.

However, that means that if someone wants to implement these playmodes, they
have to implement the whole player from the ground up. This means
(I think) the mp3 decoder, the UI, the visuals, the EQ behaviour (I know
this is dear to your heart, Tony), the smarts which make sure we
use the hard drive as little as possible (I think),
basically the whole shebang.

Any such implementation is almost certainly doomed to be a very
poor cousin to the existing player overall, even if it is
superior in one tiny facet (e.g. new playmodes).

Basically what I'm after is a way to extend the player functionality,
without taking anything away from it, or from the guys at empeg.
It would be cool to be able to add new menu items, or new
visuals, or new song selection routines to the existing stuff,
but to do that properly that would require assorted hooks in the player,
some library routines to make things easier and other things that
could be high cost to do right.

My proposal above was designed to be as easy as possible for empeg
to add, without threatening their intellectual property in any way.

It would be really hard to come up with a good playmode of similar
complexity to the one I detailed earlier, that could be generic
enough to distribute as part of the player. I don't even want
to think about the UI (good UI design is HARD).

The point is, I would never expect empeg to cater to my every little
whim by distributing umpteen different playmodes, but it would be
comparatively easy to let me do the catering.

Richard.