Saying good-bye to RealPlayer
I just have to say w00t! I’m finally getting rid of RealPlayer, after almost 10 years of using it, I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I’ve been using the RealPlayer for so long simply because of 1 skin, and I finally said screw it and did something about it. About a year ago I finally got fed up with the constant spam to upgrade to RealPlayer 11, and a few other things, so I decided to just go write my own media player.
I hate the fact that RealPlayer’s “database” gets corrupted every so often. It’s not even a real database, it’s just a bunch of windows shortcuts to your mp3s. I also hate the fact that if you update the tags for your mp3s it doesn’t actually get saved to the mp3, so if the “database” corrupts, those edits are lost. RealPlayer’s library window is a piece of crap too…it used to remember what you were last viewing (i.e. your library and not their crappy web page advertisements) and it used to keep the library and now playing lists open in the media browser. Currently, you have to go back through a whole bunch of mess to get the library window back to the way it was when you last used it. Honestly, I’m really tired of having to look at RealNetworks’ webpage every time I open the media browser after the last time I exited the program.
Really, my biggest beef aside from the crappy media browser is the fact that I subscribed to their “SuperPass” deal for somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 years and finally dropped my subscription to it a couple years ago. All the websites I used SuperPass for stopped using it and made their own flash players. I subscribed so I could watch the news and wanted the equalizer and cross fader. I ended up unsubscribing because I felt I was just throwing money away simply for an equalizer and a cross fader. The second I unsubscribed, my equalizer disappeared and so did my cross fader. I found out I had to shell out even more money just to keep those features by purchasing the “full” RealPlayer. You would figure that someone who spent hundreds of dollars on their SuperPass service would at least get to keep a fully functional player after unsubscribing, but no, that didn’t happen. So, I spent the money for the full player and went on my merry way.
A year or two later I follow their advice to upgrade to RealPlayer 11, only to find out they removed skins. I went around and around with their tech support and they kept insisting that skins were enabled in RealPlayer 11. I finally came across a few posts on their forums about the feature being axed in 11 and decided it’s time to just rid myself of this crappy, outdated player. I uninstalled RealPlayer 11 and reinstalled the last version of RealPlayer that I had before the upgrade. What really sucked is the upgrade wasn’t “free” as they stated, I had to buy the full RealPlayer 11, in order to keep the equalizer and cross fader.
I had started writing a media player in Delphi 5 years ago and figured it was a good time to resurrect that project again. At first I started screen-shotting the skin that I use in various states to cut up in Photoshop, but that was proving to be a royal pain. I started researching how to make a skin and figured out that skins are basically just zip files with the graphics and some settings in them. I extracted all the images for my favorite skin, messed with some of the images and threw them into a form in Delphi 6.
This is the result:
Player Idle:
Player Playing:
Player with the equalizer settings open:
(animates sliding in and out of
the bar it sits on)
Player with sound effects open:
(animates sliding in and out of
the bar it sits on)
Player without video/visualization window visible:
Library window:
It’s based on the BASS libraries from http://www.un4seen.com and a sample component for Delphi that is a wrapper for their API. While at the moment it’s not finished, but it will build a library of my media and play playlists etc. It has Shoutcast/Icecast support so I can listen to EVE Radio with it as well. The spectrum analyzer pictured was lifted from a demo program on how to use the BASS libraries and adapted to work on a much larger scale with a background image. I put in a 10 band equalizer and effects like reverb, echo, flanger and rotating the sound around your speakers. I also put in the ability to save custom EQ settings. I’m considering putting in presets for “room” ambiance, which will basically just be different levels of reverb/echo to simulate different types/sizes of rooms like cathedrals, garages, living rooms etc.
So far it’s so much better than RealPlayer even with its limited functionality at the moment. There’s no annoying web browser in the player, there’s no advertisements, no spam when closing it telling me to upgrade. It’s mostly stable now, and if something is broken, I just go fix the code. I also like the fact that with the same number of tracks in my library, my player takes up less than half the amount of memory RealPlayer does once you finish opening up their library browser and finally get to the list of your music. I also managed to put in some DirectShow stuff for playing video.
I’m planning on having it convert media files to different formats, ripping and burning CDs and might add some support for transferring media to mp3 players (namely iRiver mp3 players, since I own one). I may add some more visualizations at some point, but for now the spectrum analyzer works fine, and I animated that little atom picture to rotate the colors of the nebula behind it and brighten and dim the background. I can also hide the visualization panel completely if I feel like it.
I’ve hated the RealPlayer for years now, but just couldn’t get rid of it because of the skin I’ve been using for so long. I’m so happy I’ve finally gotten myself to a point where I don’t have to look at the damn thing unless it’s to play a RealMedia clip or something. I might look into adding support for Helix DNA streams (if BASS doesn’t already cover it), but who knows, RealPlayer formats are so out dated now, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Helix DNA format die off as well since it’s based on the original RealPlayer streaming format.
I might even make this available for download once I finish it. There’s only a small problem with what to do for the library database. Currently I’m using Paradox tables, which aren’t the best choice for that sort of thing in my opinion, but I’m sure as hell not going to use RealPlayer’s method of making a windows shortcut file for every single thing in your library. If I continue to use Paradox or any other BDE type database, I’ll have to distribute the BDE with my program. I previously figured out a way to do that without forcing the user to install the BDE with my EverQuest II log parser, but it will add around 5 or 6 mb to the distribution. There’s also the potential of having problems with the tables if they get to a certain size, which I’d rather not have the same thing with a corrupt database happen with this. I could port the database to multiple platforms and let the user choose, but not many people know what to do with stuff like PostgreSQL or MySQL. I won’t use MS Access as a storage medium, it’s just an awful database platform all together.
We’ll see how it shapes up in the next few months. I still have a lot to do on the library before I’ll really be happy with it.
