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XMPlay Audio Player

Written by Martin on Saturday, August 30th, 2008

This is guest post from Martin over at gHacks. Chances are that that’s where you’ve come from anyway, so he doesn’t need much of an introduction!

Josh asked me to write a few articles as a guest blogger here at Extendably and I figured it would be a nice way to educate the masses about my favourite audio player XMPlay. I already mentioned XMPlay a few times at my own blog Ghacks but never really got into writing about the plugins that are available for it.

You see, XMPlay is a audio player that plays many music formats out of the box. It does not support a few of the “rarer” music formats by default but support for these formats can be added by plugins. It obviously plays mp3, ogg, wav and wma by default plus a handful of other more exotic formats like mod or mp2. Those are usually sufficient for most users but you occasionally come upon a flac, ape or xm file that you want to play.

Enter XMPlay plugins.

Several XMPlay plugins add support for additional audio formats like flac, real audio, midi, mp4 and aac which can be picked and installed independently from each other.

That’s an interesting concept in my opinion. One of the reasons why the player uses such a low memory threshold is the fact that it does not include features and plugins users never use. That’s my theory on why the plugins are not integrated into the main program.

I personally thing that this is a great approach. Most users will never use a flac or midi file these days and will not notice that the format is missing. Users who do use those files regularly will probably know where to lock to get the plugin to play their audio files properly.