1.
AMD TrueAudio
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TrueAudio is integrated into some of the AMD GPUs and APUs available since 2013. TrueAudio is a DSP for audio based on Cadence Tensilica HiFi EP DSP with Tensilica Xtensa SP float support, AMD claimed that a few simple audio effects can use up to 14% of the CPU. Audiokinetic claimed that it is up to 10%, independent software vendors, such as game developers, can use what is called a Wwise audio plugin to offload such computations to the TrueAudio DSPs. Any additional benefits of the TrueAudio DSPs, such as effects, have been severely criticized. The possibility to include multiple TrueAudio DSPs on a die speak to the expected acceleration benefits, and in case latency is important, the on-die TrueAudio DSPs should have a much lower latency than a discrete sound card on the PCI bus. It may be noteworthy that Unified Video Decoder is another ASIC by AMD which is based on Tensilicas Xtensa. In 18 March 2014, AnandTech evaluated AMD TrueAudio using the Thief video game, a new version of TrueAudio, TrueAudio Next, was released with the AMD Radeon 400 series GPUs. TrueAudio Next utilizes the GPU to simulate audio physics, the move from a dedicated DSP to GPGPU breaks compatibility with the previous TrueAudio implementation. The TrueAudio Next SDK was released as open source through AMDs GPUOpen suite in August 2016 and it also clarified that TrueAudio Next uses the GPUs ray-casting technology to do the audio computation, and can also reserve GCN compute units for lower latency. AMD TrueAudio enables dedicated digital signal processing, such dedicated audio processing horsepower is specifically for generating immersive soundscapes and saves CPU cycles that can be used for other game processing tasks such as AI and Physics. The video games Murdered, Soul Suspect, Star Citizen, Thief and Lichdom, there is an audio plug-in for Audiokinetics Wwise to off-load computation to the TrueAudio DSP. Wwise is available for Linux, OS X, Windows, PlayStation 4, AstoundSound is also wrapped for several plug-in formats, such as RTAS and Wwise and has been integrated into several DSP chips. AstoundSound is described as fully programmable audio engine, as of July 2014 there are no news regarding products supporting TrueAudio and LV2. Tuscany AstoundSound on YouTube – special version of Tuscany VR demo from Oculus VR, spatialization is a technique that permits the audio engine to create a fully 3D soundfield on a stereo headset. This effect is powered by the positional 3D audio plugin AstoundSound 3D RTI by GenAudio, AstoundSound is e. g. integrated with the FMOD Studio. For more information on TrueAudio Next please visit http, //gpuopen. com/gaming-product/true-audio-next/ AMD TrueAudio is found on-die of select AMD graphics cards, a die can house multiple AMD TrueAudio DSP cores, each having 32KiB instruction and data caches and 8KiB of scratchpad memory for local operation. TrueAudio is also supported by the PlayStation 4 hardware, some I²S solution is being used
2.
Software developer
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A software developer is a person concerned with facets of the software development process, including the research, design, programming, and testing of computer software. Other job titles which are used with similar meanings are programmer, software analyst. According to developer Eric Sink, the differences between system design, software development, and programming are more apparent, even more so that developers become systems architects, those who design the multi-leveled architecture or component interactions of a large software system. In a large company, there may be employees whose sole responsibility consists of one of the phases above. In smaller development environments, a few people or even an individual might handle the complete process. The word software was coined as a prank as early as 1953, before this time, computers were programmed either by customers, or the few commercial computer vendors of the time, such as UNIVAC and IBM. The first company founded to provide products and services was Computer Usage Company in 1955. The software industry expanded in the early 1960s, almost immediately after computers were first sold in mass-produced quantities, universities, government, and business customers created a demand for software. Many of these programs were written in-house by full-time staff programmers, some were distributed freely between users of a particular machine for no charge. Others were done on a basis, and other firms such as Computer Sciences Corporation started to grow. The computer/hardware makers started bundling operating systems, systems software and programming environments with their machines, new software was built for microcomputers, so other manufacturers including IBM, followed DECs example quickly, resulting in the IBM AS/400 amongst others. The industry expanded greatly with the rise of the computer in the mid-1970s. In the following years, it created a growing market for games, applications. DOS, Microsofts first operating system product, was the dominant operating system at the time, by 2014 the role of cloud developer had been defined, in this context, one definition of a developer in general was published, Developers make software for the world to use. The job of a developer is to crank out code -- fresh code for new products, code fixes for maintenance, code for business logic, bus factor Software Developer description from the US Department of Labor
3.
Software release life cycle
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Usage of the alpha/beta test terminology originated at IBM. As long ago as the 1950s, IBM used similar terminology for their hardware development, a test was the verification of a new product before public announcement. B test was the verification before releasing the product to be manufactured, C test was the final test before general availability of the product. Martin Belsky, a manager on some of IBMs earlier software projects claimed to have invented the terminology, IBM dropped the alpha/beta terminology during the 1960s, but by then it had received fairly wide notice. The usage of beta test to refer to testing done by customers was not done in IBM, rather, IBM used the term field test. Pre-alpha refers to all activities performed during the project before formal testing. These activities can include requirements analysis, software design, software development, in typical open source development, there are several types of pre-alpha versions. Milestone versions include specific sets of functions and are released as soon as the functionality is complete, the alpha phase of the release life cycle is the first phase to begin software testing. In this phase, developers generally test the software using white-box techniques, additional validation is then performed using black-box or gray-box techniques, by another testing team. Moving to black-box testing inside the organization is known as alpha release, alpha software can be unstable and could cause crashes or data loss. Alpha software may not contain all of the features that are planned for the final version, in general, external availability of alpha software is uncommon in proprietary software, while open source software often has publicly available alpha versions. The alpha phase usually ends with a freeze, indicating that no more features will be added to the software. At this time, the software is said to be feature complete, Beta, named after the second letter of the Greek alphabet, is the software development phase following alpha. Software in the stage is also known as betaware. Beta phase generally begins when the software is complete but likely to contain a number of known or unknown bugs. Software in the phase will generally have many more bugs in it than completed software, as well as speed/performance issues. The focus of beta testing is reducing impacts to users, often incorporating usability testing, the process of delivering a beta version to the users is called beta release and this is typically the first time that the software is available outside of the organization that developed it. Beta version software is useful for demonstrations and previews within an organization
4.
Operating system
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An operating system is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs. All computer programs, excluding firmware, require a system to function. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer – from cellular phones, the dominant desktop operating system is Microsoft Windows with a market share of around 83. 3%. MacOS by Apple Inc. is in place, and the varieties of Linux is in third position. Linux distributions are dominant in the server and supercomputing sectors, other specialized classes of operating systems, such as embedded and real-time systems, exist for many applications. A single-tasking system can run one program at a time. Multi-tasking may be characterized in preemptive and co-operative types, in preemptive multitasking, the operating system slices the CPU time and dedicates a slot to each of the programs. Unix-like operating systems, e. g. Solaris, Linux, cooperative multitasking is achieved by relying on each process to provide time to the other processes in a defined manner. 16-bit versions of Microsoft Windows used cooperative multi-tasking, 32-bit versions of both Windows NT and Win9x, used preemptive multi-tasking. Single-user operating systems have no facilities to distinguish users, but may allow multiple programs to run in tandem, a distributed operating system manages a group of distinct computers and makes them appear to be a single computer. The development of networked computers that could be linked and communicate with each other gave rise to distributed computing, distributed computations are carried out on more than one machine. When computers in a work in cooperation, they form a distributed system. The technique is used both in virtualization and cloud computing management, and is common in large server warehouses, embedded operating systems are designed to be used in embedded computer systems. They are designed to operate on small machines like PDAs with less autonomy and they are able to operate with a limited number of resources. They are very compact and extremely efficient by design, Windows CE and Minix 3 are some examples of embedded operating systems. A real-time operating system is a system that guarantees to process events or data by a specific moment in time. A real-time operating system may be single- or multi-tasking, but when multitasking, early computers were built to perform a series of single tasks, like a calculator. Basic operating system features were developed in the 1950s, such as resident monitor functions that could run different programs in succession to speed up processing
5.
Audio codec
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An audio codec is a device or computer program capable of coding or decoding a digital data stream of audio. In software, a codec is a computer program implementing an algorithm that compresses and decompresses digital audio data according to a given audio file or streaming media audio coding format. The objective of the algorithm is to represent the high-fidelity audio signal with minimum number of bits while retaining the quality and this can effectively reduce the storage space and the bandwidth required for transmission of the stored audio file. Most codecs are implemented as libraries which interface to one or more multimedia players, in hardware, audio codec refers to a single device that encodes analog audio as digital signals and decodes digital back into analog. In other words, it both an analog-to-digital converter and digital-to-analog converter running off the same clock. This is used in cards that support both audio in and out, for instance. Comparison of audio formats List of codecs Open source codecs and containers Transcoding Video codec
6.
Software license
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A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law all software is copyright protected, in code as also object code form. The only exception is software in the public domain, most distributed software can be categorized according to its license type. Two common categories for software under copyright law, and therefore with licenses which grant the licensee specific rights, are proprietary software and free, unlicensed software outside the copyright protection is either public domain software or software which is non-distributed, non-licensed and handled as internal business trade secret. Contrary to popular belief, distributed unlicensed software is copyright protected. Examples for this are unauthorized software leaks or software projects which are placed on public software repositories like GitHub without specified license. As voluntarily handing software into the domain is problematic in some international law domains, there are also licenses granting PD-like rights. Therefore, the owner of a copy of software is legally entitled to use that copy of software. Hence, if the end-user of software is the owner of the respective copy, as many proprietary licenses only enumerate the rights that the user already has under 17 U. S. C. §117, and yet proclaim to take away from the user. Proprietary software licenses often proclaim to give software publishers more control over the way their software is used by keeping ownership of each copy of software with the software publisher. The form of the relationship if it is a lease or a purchase, for example UMG v. Augusto or Vernor v. Autodesk. The ownership of goods, like software applications and video games, is challenged by licensed. The Swiss based company UsedSoft innovated the resale of business software and this feature of proprietary software licenses means that certain rights regarding the software are reserved by the software publisher. Therefore, it is typical of EULAs to include terms which define the uses of the software, the most significant effect of this form of licensing is that, if ownership of the software remains with the software publisher, then the end-user must accept the software license. In other words, without acceptance of the license, the end-user may not use the software at all, one example of such a proprietary software license is the license for Microsoft Windows. The most common licensing models are per single user or per user in the appropriate volume discount level, Licensing per concurrent/floating user also occurs, where all users in a network have access to the program, but only a specific number at the same time. Another license model is licensing per dongle which allows the owner of the dongle to use the program on any computer, Licensing per server, CPU or points, regardless the number of users, is common practice as well as site or company licenses
7.
GNU General Public License
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The GNU General Public License is a widely used free software license, which guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software. The license was written by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation for the GNU Project. The GPL is a license, which means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free licenses, of which the BSD licenses. GPL was the first copyleft license for general use, historically, the GPL license family has been one of the most popular software licenses in the free and open-source software domain. Prominent free software licensed under the GPL include the Linux kernel. In 2007, the version of the license was released to address some perceived problems with the second version that were discovered during its long-time usage. To keep the license up to date, the GPL license includes an optional any later version clause, developers can omit it when licensing their software, for instance the Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2 without the any later version clause. The GPL was written by Richard Stallman in 1989, for use with programs released as part of the GNU project, the original GPL was based on a unification of similar licenses used for early versions of GNU Emacs, the GNU Debugger and the GNU C Compiler. These licenses contained similar provisions to the modern GPL, but were specific to each program, rendering them incompatible, Stallmans goal was to produce one license that could be used for any project, thus making it possible for many projects to share code. The second version of the license, version 2, was released in 1991, version 3 was developed to attempt to address these concerns and was officially released on 29 June 2007. Version 1 of the GNU GPL, released on 25 February 1989, the first problem was that distributors may publish binary files only—executable, but not readable or modifiable by humans. To prevent this, GPLv1 stated that any vendor distributing binaries must also make the source code available under the same licensing terms. The second problem was that distributors might add restrictions, either to the license, the union of two sets of restrictions would apply to the combined work, thus adding unacceptable restrictions. To prevent this, GPLv1 stated that modified versions, as a whole, had to be distributed under the terms in GPLv1. Therefore, software distributed under the terms of GPLv1 could be combined with software under more permissive terms, according to Richard Stallman, the major change in GPLv2 was the Liberty or Death clause, as he calls it – Section 7. The section says that licensees may distribute a GPL-covered work only if they can all of the licenses obligations. In other words, the obligations of the license may not be severed due to conflicting obligations and this provision is intended to discourage any party from using a patent infringement claim or other litigation to impair users freedom under the license
8.
International standard
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International standards are standards developed by international standards organizations. International standards are available for consideration and use worldwide, the most prominent organization is the International Organization for Standardization. International standards may be used either by application or by a process of modifying an international standard to suit local conditions. Technical barriers arise when different groups together, each with a large user base. Establishing international standards is one way of preventing or overcoming this problem, the implementation of standards in industry and commerce became highly important with the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the need for high-precision machine tools and interchangeable parts. Henry Maudslay developed the first industrially practical screw-cutting lathe in 1800, maudslays work, as well as the contributions of other engineers, accomplished a modest amount of industry standardization, some companies in-house standards spread a bit within their industries. Joseph Whitworths screw thread measurements were adopted as the first national standard by companies around the country in 1841 and it came to be known as the British Standard Whitworth, and was widely adopted in other countries. By the end of the 19th century differences in standards between companies were making trade increasingly difficult and strained, the Engineering Standards Committee was established in London in 1901 as the worlds first national standards body. After the First World War, similar national bodies were established in other countries, by the mid to late 19th century, efforts were being made to standardize electrical measurement. An important figure was R. E. B, Crompton, who became concerned by the large range of different standards and systems used by electrical engineering companies and scientists in the early 20th century. Many companies had entered the market in the 1890s and all chose their own settings for voltage, frequency, current, adjacent buildings would have totally incompatible electrical systems simply because they had been fitted out by different companies. Crompton could see the lack of efficiency in this system and began to consider proposals for a standard for electric engineering. In 1904, Crompton represented Britain at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis as part of a delegation by the Institute of Electrical Engineers. He presented a paper on standardisation, which was so well received that he was asked to look into the formation of a commission to oversee the process. By 1906 his work was complete and he drew up a permanent constitution for the first international standards organization, the body held its first meeting that year in London, with representatives from 14 countries. In honour of his contribution to electrical standardisation, Lord Kelvin was elected as the bodys first President, the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations was founded in 1926 with a broader remit to enhance international cooperation for all technical standards and specifications. The body was suspended in 1942 during World War II, after the war, ISA was approached by the recently formed United Nations Standards Coordinating Committee with a proposal to form a new global standards body. List of international common standards List of technical standard organisations Global Frameworks and standards organized along function lines, accessed 2014 ^ Cordova
9.
Filename
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A filename is a name used to uniquely identify a computer file stored in a file system. Different file systems impose different restrictions on filename lengths and the characters within filenames. Discussions of filenames are complicated by a lack of standardisation of the term, sometimes filename is used to mean the entire name, such as the Windows name c, \directory\myfile. txt. Sometimes, it will be used to refer to the components, sometimes, it is a reference that excludes an extension, so the filename would be just myfile. Such ambiguity is widespread and this article does not attempt to define any one meaning, some systems will adopt their own standardised nomenclature like path name, but these too are not standardised across systems. Around 1962, the Compatible Time-Sharing System introduced the concept of a file, around this same time appeared the dot as a filename extension separator, and the limit to three letter extensions might have come from RAD50 16-bit limits. Traditionally, filenames allowed only alphanumeric characters, but as time progressed and this led to compatibility problems when moving files from one file system to another. Around 1995, VFAT, an extension to the FAT filesystem, was introduced in Windows 95 and it allowed mixed-case Unicode long filenames, in addition to classic 8.3 names. In 1985, RFC959 officially defined a pathname to be the string that must be entered into a file system by a user in order to identify a file. One issue was migration to Unicode, for this purpose, several software companies provided software for migrating filenames to the new Unicode encoding. Microsoft provided migration transparent for the user throughout the vfat technology Apple provided File Name Encoding Repair Utility v1.0, Mac OS X10.3 marked Apples adoption of Unicode 3.2 character decomposition, superseding the Unicode 2.1 decomposition used previously. This change caused problems for writing software for Mac OS X. An absolute reference includes all directory levels, in some systems, a filename reference that does not include the complete directory path defaults to the current working directory. One advantage of using a reference in program configuration files or scripts is that different instances of the script or program can use different files. This makes an absolute or relative path composed of a sequence of filenames, Unix-like file systems allow a file to have more than one name, in traditional Unix-style file systems, the names are hard links to the files inode or equivalent. Windows supports hard links on NTFS file systems, and provides the command fsutil in Windows XP, hard links are different from Windows shortcuts, classic Mac OS/macOS aliases, or symbolic links. The introduction of LFNs with VFAT allowed filename aliases, with a maximum of eight plus three characters was a filename alias of long file name. As a way to conform to 8.3 limitations for older programs and this property was used by the move command algorithm that first creates a second filename and then only removes the first filename
10.
FLAC
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FLAC is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, and is also the name of the reference codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLACs algorithm can typically be reduced to 50–60% of its original size, FLAC is an open format with royalty-free licensing and a reference implementation which is free software. FLAC has support for metadata tagging, album art. Development was started in 2000 by Josh Coalson, the bit-stream format was frozen when FLAC entered beta stage with the release of version 0.5 of the reference implementation on 15 January 2001. Version 1.0 was released on 20 July 2001, on 29 January 2003, the Xiph. Org Foundation and the FLAC project announced the incorporation of FLAC under the Xiph. org banner. Xiph. org is behind other free compression formats such as Vorbis, Theora, Speex and Opus. Version 1.3.0 was released on 26 May 2013, at which point development was moved to the Xiph. org git repository. flac files, the reference implementation is free software. The source code for libFLAC and libFLAC++ is available under the BSD license, and the sources for flac, metaflac, in its stated goals, the FLAC project encourages its developers not to implement copy prevention features of any kind. FLAC supports only fixed-point samples, not floating-point and it can handle any PCM bit resolution from 4 to 32 bits per sample, any sampling rate from 1 Hz to 655,350 Hz in 1 Hz increments, and any number of channels from 1 to 8. Channels can be grouped in some cases, for stereo and 5.1 channel surround. FLAC uses CRC checksums for identifying corrupted frames when used in a streaming protocol, FLAC allows for a Rice parameter between 0 and 16. FLAC uses linear prediction to convert the audio samples, there are two steps, the predictor and the error coding. The predictor can be one of four types, the difference between the predictor and the actual sample data is calculated and is known as the residual. The residual is stored efficiently using Golomb-Rice coding and it also uses run-length encoding for blocks of identical samples, such as silent passages. For tagging, FLAC uses the system as Vorbis comments. The libFLAC API is organized into streams, seekable streams, most FLAC applications will generally restrict themselves to encoding/decoding using libFLAC at the file level interface. LibFLAC uses a compression level parameter that varies from 0 to 8, the compressed files are always perfect, lossless representations of the original data. Although the compression process involves a tradeoff between speed and size, the process is always quite fast and not very dependent on the level of compression
11.
Algorithm
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In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a self-contained sequence of actions to be performed. Algorithms can perform calculation, data processing and automated reasoning tasks, an algorithm is an effective method that can be expressed within a finite amount of space and time and in a well-defined formal language for calculating a function. The transition from one state to the next is not necessarily deterministic, some algorithms, known as randomized algorithms, giving a formal definition of algorithms, corresponding to the intuitive notion, remains a challenging problem. In English, it was first used in about 1230 and then by Chaucer in 1391, English adopted the French term, but it wasnt until the late 19th century that algorithm took on the meaning that it has in modern English. Another early use of the word is from 1240, in a manual titled Carmen de Algorismo composed by Alexandre de Villedieu and it begins thus, Haec algorismus ars praesens dicitur, in qua / Talibus Indorum fruimur bis quinque figuris. Which translates as, Algorism is the art by which at present we use those Indian figures, the poem is a few hundred lines long and summarizes the art of calculating with the new style of Indian dice, or Talibus Indorum, or Hindu numerals. An informal definition could be a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations, which would include all computer programs, including programs that do not perform numeric calculations. Generally, a program is only an algorithm if it stops eventually, but humans can do something equally useful, in the case of certain enumerably infinite sets, They can give explicit instructions for determining the nth member of the set, for arbitrary finite n. An enumerably infinite set is one whose elements can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the integers, the concept of algorithm is also used to define the notion of decidability. That notion is central for explaining how formal systems come into being starting from a set of axioms. In logic, the time that an algorithm requires to complete cannot be measured, from such uncertainties, that characterize ongoing work, stems the unavailability of a definition of algorithm that suits both concrete and abstract usage of the term. Algorithms are essential to the way computers process data, thus, an algorithm can be considered to be any sequence of operations that can be simulated by a Turing-complete system. Although this may seem extreme, the arguments, in its favor are hard to refute. Gurevich. Turings informal argument in favor of his thesis justifies a stronger thesis, according to Savage, an algorithm is a computational process defined by a Turing machine. Typically, when an algorithm is associated with processing information, data can be read from a source, written to an output device. Stored data are regarded as part of the state of the entity performing the algorithm. In practice, the state is stored in one or more data structures, for some such computational process, the algorithm must be rigorously defined, specified in the way it applies in all possible circumstances that could arise. That is, any conditional steps must be dealt with, case-by-case
12.
Plug-in (computing)
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In computing, a plug-in is a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program. When a program supports plug-ins, it enables customization, the common examples are the plug-ins used in web browsers to add new features such as search-engines, virus scanners, or the ability to use a new file type such as a new video format. Applications support plug-ins for many reasons, types of applications and why they use plug-ins, Audio editors use plug-ins to generate, process or analyse sound. Ardour and Audacity are examples of such editors, email clients use plug-ins to decrypt and encrypt email. Pretty Good Privacy is an example of such plug-ins, graphics software use plug-ins to support file formats and process images. Media players use plug-ins to support file formats and apply filters, foobar2000, GStreamer, Quintessential, VST, Winamp, XMMS are examples of such media players. Packet sniffers use plug-ins to decode packet formats, omniPeek is an example of such packet sniffers. Remote sensing applications use plug-ins to process data from different sensor types, Visual Studio itself can be plugged into other applications via Visual Studio Tools for Office and Visual Studio Tools for Applications. Web browsers use browser extensions to expand their functionality, examples include Adobe Flash Player, Java SE, QuickTime, Microsoft Silverlight and Unity. The host application provides services which the plug-in can use, including a way for plug-ins to register themselves with the host application, plug-ins depend on the services provided by the host application and do not usually work by themselves. Programmers typically implement plug-in functionality using shared libraries installed in a place prescribed by the host application, HyperCard supported a similar facility, but more commonly included the plug-in code in the HyperCard documents themselves. Thus the HyperCard stack became a self-contained application in its own right, programs may also implement plugins by loading a directory of simple script files written in a scripting language like Python or Lua. In Mozilla Foundation definitions, the words add-on, extension and plug-in are not synonyms, add-on can refer to anything that extends the functions of a Mozilla application. Extensions comprise a subtype, albeit the most common and the most powerful one, Mozilla applications come with integrated add-on managers that, similar to package managers, install, update and manage extensions. The term, Plug-in, however, strictly refers to NPAPI-based web content renderers, the plug-in program could make calls to the editor to have it perform text-editing services upon the buffer that the editor shared with the plug-in. The Waterloo Fortran compiler used this feature to allow interactive compilation of Fortran programs edited by EDT, very early PC software applications to incorporate plug-in functionality included HyperCard and QuarkXPress on the Macintosh, both released in 1987. In 1988, Silicon Beach Software included plug-in functionality in Digital Darkroom and SuperPaint, and Ed Bomke coined the term plug-in
13.
ID3
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ID3 is a metadata container most often used in conjunction with the MP3 audio file format. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, ID3 is also specified by Apple as a timed metadata in HTTP Live Streaming, carried as a PID in the main transport stream or in separate audio TS. There are two unrelated versions of ID3, ID3v1 and ID3v2, ID3v1 takes the form of a 128-byte segment at the end of an MP3 file containing a fixed set of data fields. ID3v1.1 is a modification which adds a track number field at the expense of a slight shortening of the comment field. ID3v2 is structurally different from ID3v1, consisting of an extensible set of frames located at the start of the file, each with a frame identifier. 83 types of frames are declared in the ID3v2.4 specification, there are standard frames for containing cover art, BPM, copyright and license, lyrics, and arbitrary text and URL data, as well as other things. Three versions of ID3v2 have been documented, each of which has extended the frame definitions, ID3 is a de facto standard for metadata in MP3 files, no standardization body was involved in its creation nor has such an organization given it a formal approval status. It competes with the APE tag in this arena, the MP3 standard did not include a method for storing file metadata. In 1996 Eric Kemp had the idea to add a small chunk of data to the audio file, the method, now known as ID3v1, quickly became the de facto standard for storing metadata in MP3s. The format was released by Damaged Cybernetics, an group that specialized in cracking console gaming systems. There was no identifying information for any of the cracked console ROMs, Eric and associates carried this over into MP3 files. This format was used for a number of file formats unknown at that time, the ID3v1 tag occupies 128 bytes, beginning with the string TAG128 bytes from the end of the file. The tag was placed at the end of the file to maintain compatibility with older media players, some players would play a small burst of static when they read the tag, but most ignored it, and almost all modern players will correctly skip it. This tag allows 30 bytes each for the title, artist, album, and a comment, four bytes for the year, one improvement to ID3v1 was made by Michael Mutschler in 1997. Since the comment field was too small to write anything useful, such tags are referred to as ID3v1.1. Strings are either space- or zero-padded, unset string entries are filled using an empty string. ID3v1 pre-defines a set of genres denoted by numerical codes, Winamp extended the list by adding more genres in its own music player, which were later adopted by others. However, support for the extended Winamp list is not universal, in some cases, only the genres up to 125 are supported. g. for fading in
14.
Compact disc
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Compact disc is a digital optical disc data storage format released in 1982 and co-developed by Philips and Sony. The format was developed to store and play only sound recordings but was later adapted for storage of data. The first commercially available Audio CD player, the Sony CDP-101, was released October 1982 in Japan, standard CDs have a diameter of 120 millimetres and can hold up to about 80 minutes of uncompressed audio or about 700 MiB of data. The Mini CD has various diameters ranging from 60 to 80 millimetres, they are used for CD singles, storing up to 24 minutes of audio. At the time of the introduction in 1982, a CD could store much more data than a personal computer hard drive. By 2010, hard drives commonly offered as much space as a thousand CDs. In 2004, worldwide sales of audio CDs, CD-ROMs and CD-Rs reached about 30 billion discs, by 2007,200 billion CDs had been sold worldwide. In 2014, revenues from digital music services matched those from physical format sales for the first time. American inventor James T. Russell has been credited with inventing the first system to record information on an optical transparent foil that is lit from behind by a high-power halogen lamp. Russells patent application was first filed in 1966, and he was granted a patent in 1970, following litigation, Sony and Philips licensed Russells patents in the 1980s. The compact disc is an evolution of LaserDisc technology, where a laser beam is used that enables the high information density required for high-quality digital audio signals. Prototypes were developed by Philips and Sony independently in the late 1970s, although originally dismissed by Philips Research management as a trivial pursuit, the CD became the primary focus for Philips as the LaserDisc format struggled. In 1979, Sony and Philips set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new audio disc. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the Red Book CD-DA standard was published in 1980, after their commercial release in 1982, compact discs and their players were extremely popular. Despite costing up to $1,000, over 400,000 CD players were sold in the United States between 1983 and 1984, by 1988 CD sales in the United States surpassed those of vinyl LPs, and by 1992 CD sales surpassed those of prerecorded music cassette tapes. The success of the disc has been credited to the cooperation between Philips and Sony, who came together to agree upon and develop compatible hardware. The unified design of the disc allowed consumers to purchase any disc or player from any company. In 1974, L. However, due to the performance of the analog format
15.
DVD
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DVD is a digital optical disc storage format invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. The medium can store any kind of data and is widely used for software. DVDs offer higher capacity than compact discs while having the same dimensions. Pre-recorded DVDs are mass-produced using molding machines that physically stamp data onto the DVD, such discs are a form of DVD-ROM because data can only be read and not written or erased. Blank recordable DVD discs can be recorded using a DVD recorder. Rewritable DVDs can be recorded and erased many times, DVDs containing other types of information may be referred to as DVD data discs. The OED also states that in 1995, The companies said the name of the format will simply be DVD. Toshiba had been using the name ‘digital video disk’, but that was switched to ‘digital versatile disk’ after computer companies complained that it left out their applications, Digital versatile disc is the explanation provided in a DVD Forum Primer from 2000 and in the DVD Forums mission statement. There were several formats developed for recording video on optical discs before the DVD, Optical recording technology was invented by David Paul Gregg and James Russell in 1958 and first patented in 1961. A consumer optical disc data format known as LaserDisc was developed in the United States and it used much larger discs than the later formats. CD Video used analog video encoding on optical discs matching the established standard 120 mm size of audio CDs, Video CD became one of the first formats for distributing digitally encoded films in this format, in 1993. In the same year, two new optical disc formats were being developed. By the time of the launches for both formats in January 1995, the MMCD nomenclature had been dropped, and Philips and Sony were referring to their format as Digital Video Disc. Representatives from the SD camp asked IBM for advice on the system to use for their disc. Alan E. Bell, a researcher from IBMs Almaden Research Center, got that request and this group was referred to as the Technical Working Group, or TWG. On August 14,1995, an ad hoc group formed from five computer companies issued a release stating that they would only accept a single format. The TWG voted to both formats unless the two camps agreed on a single, converged standard. They recruited Lou Gerstner, president of IBM, to pressure the executives of the warring factions, as a result, the DVD specification provided a storage capacity of 4.7 GB for a single-layered, single-sided disc and 8.5 GB for a dual-layered, single-sided disc
16.
Cmus
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Cmus is a small and fast console audio player for Unix-like operating systems. Cmus is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License and operates exclusively through a user interface. The text-only design reduces the resources needed to run the program, cmus was originally written by Timo Hirvonen. At around June 2008 he discontinued development of cmus, which resulted in a fork named cmus-unofficial in November 2008, after a year of development, a take over request was sent to SourceForge, which was granted after a 90-day period without response from the original author. This resulted in a merge of the back into the official project in February 2010. Cmus interface is centered on views, there are two views on the music library and views on playlists, the current play queue, the file system and for filters/settings. There is always only one view visible at any time, owing to the console-orientation and portability goals of the project, cmus is controlled exclusively via the keyboard. Commands are loosely modeled after those of the vi text editor, support for many audio formats, including, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, Musepack, WavPack, Wav, MPEG-4/AAC, ALAC, WMA, APE, TTA, SHN and MOD
17.
FFmpeg
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FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. FFmpeg is published under the GNU Lesser General Public License 2. 1+ or GNU General Public License 2+, the name of the project is inspired by the MPEG video standards group, together with FF for fast forward. The logo uses a pattern that shows how MPEG video codecs handle entropy encoding. The project was started by Fabrice Bellard in 2000, and was led by Michael Niedermayer from 2004 until 2015, some FFmpeg developers were also part of the MPlayer project. The project publishes a new release every three months on average, on January 10,2014, two Google employees announced that over 1000 bugs had been fixed in FFmpeg during the previous two years by means of fuzz testing. Two video coding formats with corresponding codecs and one container format have been created within the FFmpeg project so far, the two video codecs are the lossless FFV1, and the lossless and lossy Snow codec. Development of Snow has stalled, while its bit-stream format has not been finalized yet, the multimedia container format called NUT is no longer being actively developed, but still maintained. In summer 2010, Fiona Glaser, Ronald Bultje, and David Conrad of the FFmpeg Team announced the ffvp8 decoder, through testing, they determined that ffvp8 was faster than Googles own libvpx decoder. Starting with version 0.6, FFmpeg also supported WebM, in October 2013, a native VP9 and the OpenHEVC decoder, an open source High Efficiency Video Coding decoder, were added to FFmpeg. In 2016 the native AAC encoder was considered stable, removing support for the two external AAC encoders from VisualOn and FAAC, FFmpeg 3.0 retained build support for the Fraunhofer FDK AAC encoder. Ffmpeg is a tool that converts audio or video formats. It can also capture and encode in real-time from various hardware and software such as a TV capture card. Ffserver is an HTTP and RTSP multimedia streaming server for live and it can also be used to time shift live broadcasts. Ffplay is a media player utilizing SDL and the FFmpeg libraries. Ffprobe is a tool to display media information, see also Mediainfo. Libswresample is a library containing audio resampling routines, libavresample is a library containing audio resampling routines from the Libav project, similar to libswresample from ffmpeg. Libavcodec is a library containing all of the native FFmpeg audio/video encoders and decoders, most codecs were developed from scratch to ensure best performance and high code reusability. Libavformat is a library containing demuxers and muxers for audio/video container formats, libavutil is a helper library containing routines common to different parts of FFmpeg
18.
Audacious (software)
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Audacious is a free and open source audio player with a focus on low resource use, high audio quality, and support for a wide range of audio formats. It is designed primarily for use on POSIX-compatible systems such as Linux, Audacious is the default audio player in Lubuntu and in Ubuntu Studio. Audacious began as a fork of Beep Media Player, which itself is a fork of XMMS, william nenolod Pitcock decided to fork Beep Media Player after the original development team announced that they were stopping development in order to create a next-generation version called BMPx. According to the Audacious home page, Pitcock and others had own ideas about how a player should be designed, which wanted to try in a production environment. Since version 2.1, Audacious includes both the Winamp-like interface known from previous versions and a new, GTK+-based interface known as GTKUI, GTKUI became the default interface in Audacious 2.4. Before version 3.0, Audacious used the GTK+2. x toolkit by default, partial support for GTK+3. x was added in version 2.5, while version 3.0 has full support for GTK+3. x and uses it by default. However, dissatisfied with the evolution of GTK+3. x, MIDI via native OS synthesizer control or TiMidity. CD Audio Audacious owes a large portion of its functionality to plugins, more features are available via third-party plugins. Current versions of the Audacious core classify plugins as follows, Decoder plugins, transport plugins, which are lowlevel and implemented by the VFS layer. General plugins, which provide user-added services to the player Output plugins, visualization plugins, which provide visualizations based on fast Fourier transforms of the wave data. Effect plugins, which provide various sound processing on the audio stream Container plugins. Lowlevel plugins, which provide services to the player core and are not categorized into any of the other plugins.2. Winamp. wsz skin files, a type of Zip archive, can be used directly, the program can use Windows Bitmap graphics from the Winamp archive, although native skins for Linux are usually rendered in Portable Network Graphics format. Audacious 1. x allows the user to adjust the RGB color balance of any skin, Audacious is intended to be a standalone media player and not a server, though it accepts connections from client software, such as Conky. Connection to Audacious for remote control can be done over plain DBus, by using an MPRIS-compatible client, from XMMS to Audacious, The history of a Winamp clone. Official website Audacious on GitHub Audacious plugins on GitHub Bug tracker
19.
GStreamer
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GStreamer is a pipeline-based multimedia framework that links together a wide variety of media processing systems to complete complex workflows. For instance, GStreamer can be used to build a system that reads files in one format, processes them, the formats and processes can be changed in a plug and play fashion. GStreamer supports a variety of media-handling components, including simple audio playback, audio and video playback. The pipeline design serves as a base to many types of multimedia applications such as video editors, transcoders, streaming media broadcasters. It is designed to work on a variety of operating systems, e. g. Linux kernel-based operating systems, GStreamer is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License and is being hosted at freedesktop. org. The GNOME desktop environment, a user of GStreamer, has included GStreamer since GNOME version 2.2 and encourages GNOME. Other projects also use or support it, such as the Chameleo media platform, the Phonon media framework and the Songbird media player. GStreamer also operates in embedded devices like the Jolla Phone, the Palm Pre, Tizen, in addition to source code releases, the GStreamer project provides binary builds for Android, iOS, OSX and Windows. The LIGO Laboratory make use of GStreamer to simulate and analyze gravitational wave data, the GStreamer interface is called GstLAL. GStreamer is written in the C programming language with the system based on GObject. GStreamer processes media by connecting a number of processing elements into a pipeline, each element is provided by a plug-in. Elements can be grouped into bins, which can be further aggregated and this is an example of a filter graph. Elements communicate by means of pads, a source pad on one element can be connected to a sink pad on another. When the pipeline is in the state, data buffers flow from the source pad to the sink pad. Pads negotiate the kind of data that will be sent using capabilities, the diagram to the right could exemplify playing an MP3 file using GStreamer. The file source reads an MP3 file from a computers hard-drive, the decoder decodes the file data and converts it into PCM samples which then pass to the ALSA sound-driver. The ALSA sound-driver sends the PCM sound samples to the computers speakers, GStreamer uses a plug-in architecture which makes the most of GStreamers functionality implemented as shared libraries. GStreamers base functionality contains functions for registering and loading plug-ins and for providing the fundamentals of all classes in the form of base classes, plug-in libraries get dynamically loaded to support a wide spectrum of codecs, container formats, input/output drivers and effects
20.
Rhythmbox
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Rhythmbox is an audio player that plays and helps organize digital audio. Rhythmbox is free software, designed to work well under the GNOME desktop using the GStreamer media framework, however, Rhythmbox functions on desktop environments other than GNOME. Rhythmbox is the audio player on many linux distributions including Fedora. Rhythmbox offers a significant number of features, including, Playback from a variety of digital music sources is supported, the most common playback is music stored locally as files on the computer. Rhythmbox supports playing streamed Internet radio and podcasts as well, the ReplayGain standard is also supported. Rhythmbox also supports searching of music in the library, playlists may be created to group and order music. Users may also create playlists, ones that are automatically updated based on a customized rule of selection criteria rather than an arbitrary list of tracks. Music may be played back in shuffle mode or repeat mode, track ratings are supported and used by the shuffle mode algorithm to play higher-rated tracks more often. Enabling the crossfading backend option with a duration of 0.0 switches Rhythmbox into gapless playback mode for music formats that support it, gapless playback is not enabled by default. Audio CD ripping Comprehensive audio format support through GStreamer iPod support Since the 0.9 release, since the 0.9.5 release, Rhythmbox can display cover art of the currently playing album. The plugin can search the internet to find corresponding artwork, and as of 0.12.6, if an image file is saved in the same directory as the audio track this is used instead. Rhythmbox can browse and play sounds from SoundCloud, via built-in SoundCloud plugin, since the 0.9.5 release, Rhythmbox can provide song lyrics of the currently playing song with pressing ctrl-L. Rhythmbox can submit played songs info to a remote scrobbling service and this information is used by the remote service to provide user specific music recommendations. Rhythmbox currently supports 2 scrobbling services, Last. fm Libre. fm, Music can be scrobbled to both services at the same time. Beginning in the 0.9.6 release, Rhythmbox was able to browse, the integration was discontinued in 2011 due to technical issues. Rhythmbox supports sharing music and playing shared music on local network via DAAP sharing plugin, the plugin uses libdmapsharing to provide this feature. Rhythmbox uses the Linux udev subsystem to detect player devices, Rhythmbox can subscribe to podcasts from the iTunes Store, Miroguide. com or by manually providing a podcast feed URL. Subsequently new podcasts are downloaded and available from the Library under the section Podcasts
21.
Clementine (software)
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Clementine is a cross-platform free and open source music player and library organizer. It is a port of Amarok 1.4 to the Qt 4 framework and it is available for Unix-like, Windows and macOS. Clementine is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Clementine was created due to the transition from version 1.4 to version 2 of Amarok, and the shift of focus connected with it, which was criticized by many users. The first version of Clementine was released in February 2010, sidebar information panes with song lyrics, statistics, artist biographies and pictures. Tag editor, album cover and queue manager, creation of smart and dynamic playlists. Tabbed playlists, import and export as M3U, XSPF, PLS, ASX, transfer of music to some iPods, iPhone, MTP or any USB mass-storage player. Transcoding music into MP3, Ogg, FLAC, AAC or WMA, playback of Windows Media Files in macOS. Remote control using an Android device, a Wii Remote, MPRIS or the command-line interface, software audio players Official website Clementine in GitHub Clementine in qt-apps. org Clementine Remote Android package at the F-Droid repository
22.
VLC media player
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VLC media player is a portable, free and open-source, cross-platform media player and streaming media server written by the VideoLAN project. VLC is available for operating systems and mobile platforms, such as Windows 10 Mobile, Windows Phone, Android, Tizen, iPad, iPhone. VLC is also available on App stores such as Apples App Store, Google Play store, VLC media player supports many audio and video compression methods and file formats, including DVD-Video, video CD and streaming protocols. It is able to stream media over networks and to transcode multimedia files. The default distribution of VLC includes a number of free decoding and encoding libraries. The libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project provides many of VLCs codecs, but the player mainly uses its own muxers and it also has its own protocol implementations. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux, the VideoLan software originated as an academic project in 1996. VLC used to stand for VideoLAN Client when VLC was a client of the VideoLAN project, but since VLC is no longer merely a client, that initialism no longer applies. It was intended to consist of a client and server to stream videos from satellite dishes across a campus network, originally developed by students at the École Centrale Paris, it is now developed by contributors worldwide and is coordinated by VideoLAN, a non-profit organization. Rewritten from scratch in 1998, it was released under GNU General Public License on 1 February 2001, the functionality of the server program, VideoLan Server, has mostly been subsumed into VLC and has been deprecated. The project name has changed to VLC media player because there is no longer a client/server infrastructure. The cone icon used in VLC is a reference to the traffic cones collected by École Centrales Networking Students Association, the cone icon design was changed from a hand drawn low resolution icon to a higher resolution CGI-rendered version in 2006, illustrated by Richard Øiestad. In 2007 the VLC project decided for license compatibility reasons to not upgrade to the just released GPLv3, after 13 years of development, version 1.0.0 of VLC media player was released on 7 July 2009. Work began on VLC for Android in 2010 and it is available for Android devices on the Google Play store since 2011. In September 2010 a company named Applidium developed with endorsement of the VLC project for iOS a VLC port under GPLv2, which was accepted by Apple for their App store. Following, the VLC authors began to relicense in October 2011 the engine parts of VLC from the GPLv2 to the LGPLv2 to achieve better license compatibility, in July 2013 the VLC application could then resubmitted to the iOS App Store under the Mozilla Public License. Version 2.0.0 of VLC media player was released on February 18,2012, a version for the Windows Store was released on 13 March 2014. Support for Windows RT, Windows Phone and Xbox One were later added, as of 2016 VLC is third in the sourceforge. net overall download count, more than 2 billion downloads have occurred
23.
XMMS2
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XMMS2 is a new generation of the XMMS audio player. It is a new design, written from scratch, separate from the XMMS codebase, lXMusic, the default music player application in LXDE, is an XMMS2 client. XMMS2 borrows concepts from XMMS-era music players, such as control, a playlist, plugins, user-configurable GUI, and adds features such as a media library. Like XMMS, XMMS2 has an architecture, a type of modular architecture where certain functions are delegated to loadable libraries which provide particular functions at run-time. XMMS recognised five different types of plugins, Input plugins for reading and decoding files or streams, output plugins to handle sound output. Effects plugins to add effects to decoded audio data, before being output, visualisation plugins to provide visual animations that vary according to the audio being played. General plugins which allow for functions such as controlling XMMS via an Infrared remote control or a Joystick. XMMS2 also recognises five types of plugins, but they perform different functions. Decoder plugins for decoding data read by transport plugins, effect plugins to add effects to decoded audio data, before being output. Output plugins to handle sound output, playlist plugins to handle the importing and exporting of playlist data. Unlike XMMS2, XMMS had no library where it stored information about a users media collection, the only media resources XMMS knew about were its playlist. XMMS2s media library is integrated with the playlist. This integration means that every file or stream added to the playlist has its metadata automatically cached by the media library and this only happens once for every unique URL, so metadata isnt read again if it already exists in the library. Besides metadata, the library can also quickly and efficiently store and reload playlists. One feature of XMMS2 that has been implemented in media players is its client-server architecture. XMMS2 allows the user to choose from a number of implementations for searching, selecting and playing media. The interface can be reopened at any time for further use, other players with similar features on *nix include the Music Player Daemon and Music on Console. When first conceived, XMMS2 was simply a shared library and that is, XMMS2 would be back end code to take care of the mechanics of decoding and playing audio streams, requiring to be linked into a compiled program that provided a user interface
24.
AIMP
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AIMP is a freeware audio player for Windows and Android, originally developed by Russian developer Artem Izmaylov. The first version of AIMP, dubbed AIMP Classic, was released on August 8,2006, AIMP was initially based on the BASS audio library. Version 3 added a new engine and full support for ReplayGain. AIMP can play many types, including MP3, Advanced Audio Coding, Dolby AC-3, Ogg Vorbis, Opus, Speex, Windows Media Audio, Apple Lossless, FLAC, WAV. AIMP supports the DirectSound, ASIO and WASAPI audio interfaces, and it uses 32-bit audio processing for its 18-band equalizer and it has an Internet radio browser, and can play from Icecast or custom radio stations. It also has the ability to record Internet radio to WAV, Vorbis, what makes AIMP unique is, among other features, its ability to load the entire media file, which is currently being played back, into the RAM of the computer. One drawback of this function is that switching is slowed down as the buffer is first filled up to at least 25% before the playback starts.02 Beta a rating of 4 out of 5 stars. On November 6,2009, CNET editors also gave AIMP2 a 4 out of 5 star rating, on September 23,2016, Techradar editor Cat Ellis ranked AIMP4 at the 2nd place of the best free music players of 2016. AIMP is a program and as such brought to the users free of charge. Comparison of audio player software Official website
25.
DirectShow
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DirectShow, codename Quartz, is a multimedia framework and API produced by Microsoft for software developers to perform various operations with media files or streams. It is the replacement for Microsofts earlier Video for Windows technology, the DirectShow development tools and documentation were originally distributed as part of the DirectX SDK. Currently, they are distributed as part of the Windows SDK, Microsoft plans to completely replace DirectShow gradually with Media Foundation in future Windows versions. One reason cited by Microsoft is to much more robust support for content protection systems. Microsofts MSFT Becky Weiss also confirms that youll notice that working with the Media Foundation requires you to work at a lower level than working with DirectShow would have. And there are still DirectShow features that arent in Media Foundation, as described in the Media Foundation article, Windows Vista and Windows 7 applications use Media Foundation instead of DirectShow for several media related tasks. The direct predecessor of DirectShow, ActiveMovie, was chartered to provide MPEG-1 file playback support for Windows. The Quartz team started with a project called Clockwork. ActiveMovie was announced in March 1996, and released in May 1996, DirectShow became a standard component of all Windows operating systems starting with Windows 98, however it is available on Windows 95 by installing the latest available DirectX redistributable. In DirectX version 8.0, DirectShow became part of the distribution of the DirectX SDK and was placed alongside other DirectX APIs. In October 2004, DirectShow was removed from the main DirectX distribution, in April 2005, DirectShow was removed entirely from DirectX and moved to the Windows SDK starting with the Windows Server 2003 SP1 version of the SDK. The DirectX SDK was, however, still required to some of the DirectShow samples. Since November 2007, DirectShow APIs are part of the Windows SDK and it includes several new enhancements, codecs and filter updates such as the Enhanced Video Renderer and DXVA2.0. DirectShow divides a complex multimedia task into a sequence of processing steps known as filters. Each filter – which represents one stage in the processing of the data – has input and/or output pins that may be used to connect the filter to other filters. The generic nature of this connection mechanism enables filters to be connected in ways so as to implement different complex functions. To implement a complex task, a developer must first build a filter graph by creating instances of the required filters. There are three types of filters, Source filters These provide the source streams of data
26.
Windows Media Player
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Editions of Windows Media Player were also released for classic Mac OS, Mac OS X and Solaris but development of these has since been discontinued. Windows Media Player replaced an earlier application called Media Player, adding features beyond simple video or audio playback, Windows Media Player 11 is available for Windows XP and included in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. The default file formats are Windows Media Video, Windows Media Audio, and Advanced Systems Format, the player is also able to utilize a digital rights management service in the form of Windows Media DRM. Windows Media Player 12 is the most recent version of Windows Media Player. It was released on July 22,2009 along with Windows 7 and has not been available for previous versions of Windows nor has it been updated since for Windows 8, Windows 8.1. Unlike Windows 8, Windows RT does not run Windows Media Player, the first version of Windows Media Player appeared in 1991, when Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions was released. Originally called Media Player, this component was included with Multimedia PC-compatible machines and it was capable of playing. mmm animation files, and could be extended to support other formats. It used MCI to handle media files, being a component of Windows, Media Player shows the same version number as that of the version Windows with which it was included. Microsoft continually produced new programs to play media files, indeo 3.2 was added in a later release. Video for Windows was first available as a free add-on to Windows 3.1, in 1995, Microsoft released ActiveMovie with DirectX Media SDK. ActiveMovie incorporates a new way of dealing with files. In 1996, ActiveMovie was renamed DirectShow, however, Media Player continued to come with Windows until Windows XP, in which it was officially renamed Windows Media Player v5.1. In 1999, Windows Media Players versioning broke away from that of Windows itself, Windows Media Player 7.0 and its successors also came in the same fashion, replacing each other but leaving Media Player and Windows Media Player 6.4 intact. Windows XP is the operating system to have three different versions of Windows Media Player side by side. All versions branded Windows Media Player support DirectShow codecs, Windows Media Player version 7 was a large revamp, with a new user interface, visualizations and increased functionality. Windows Vista, however, dropped older versions of Windows Media Player in favor of v11, Windows Media Player 12 was released with Windows 7. It included support for more media formats and added new features, with Windows 8, however, the player did not receive an upgrade. On April 16,2012, Microsoft announced that Windows Media Player would not be included in Windows RT, Windows Media Player supports playback of audio, video and pictures, along with fast forward, reverse, file markers and variable playback speed
27.
JetAudio
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JetAudio is a shareware media player application for Microsoft Windows and Android which offers advanced playback options for a wide range of multimedia file formats. Initially released in 1997, JetAudio is one of the oldest extant media players for the Windows platform, apart from music and video playback, JetAudio offers functions such as metadata editing, CD ripping and burning, data conversion, sound recording and Internet radio broadcasting. It also includes sound effects. With over 21 million total downloads, JetAudio Basic is the most downloaded application in the “music management software” category on CNET Download. com. A copy of JetAudio is supplied on a mini CD with every MP3 player produced by Cowon, jetAudio’s user interface has similarities to that of Winamp in that it features separate windows for e. g. playback, playlist and music library. Like Winamp, JetAudio can also be minimized to a toolbar by pressing the “Toolbar Mode ON/OFF” button in the right portion of the Main Window. The interface centers around a 10-band spectrum visualization which doubles as an equalizer, different implementations of this spectrum visualization can be found in the Main Window, the Media Center, the Video Window, the Lyrics Viewer and the External Spectrum Viewer. In addition to these, there are four skins that display the Main Window as a bar, users are able to create their own skins using the JetAudio Skin Development Kit available for download from the JetAudio website. Some skins apply to part of the user interface, while others may only affect the Main Window. JetAudio skins can be downloaded at e. g. deviantART, Customize. org and the JetAudio Forums’ downloads section. JetAudio supports all audio and video file formats, including MP3, AAC, FLAC and Ogg Vorbis for audio. It also supports several less common formats such as Monkey’s Audio, True Audio. JetAudio comes with three visualization plugins pre-installed, PixelTrip, Space and Synesthesia, additional visualization plugins can be downloaded from e. g. Geisswerks, SoundSpectrum and morphyre. com. JetAudio has the ability to display both synchronized and unsynchronized lyrics to the music using several different methods, Lyrics are displayed in the dedicated Lyrics Viewer window, along with the album art of the file and optionally a spectrum visualization. Below are listed the different methods to display lyrics in JetAudio 8.0.17, press the “Load Lyric Files” button at the bottom of the Lyrics Window and select either “Search Lyric from CIX Lyrics” or “Search Lyric from Leo’s LDB”. If a match is found in the database, the lyrics will be downloaded and displayed in the Lyrics Viewer and it is a known error that JetAudio is unable to connect to Leo’s Lyrics database to download lyrics. As of version 8.0.17, this problem has yet to be solved, place a text file in the same directory as the music file. The simplest alternative is to place a text containing the lyrics in the same directory as the song
28.
MediaMonkey
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MediaMonkey for Windows is a digital media player and media library application developed by Ventis Media Inc. for organizing and playing audio on Microsoft Windows operating systems. By using plugins, it can be extended to handle video, both editions can be extensively enhanced with skins, third-party plugins, and user-generated extension scripts. It uses SQLite to manage its database, music can be ripped from Audio CDs and encoded into most supported formats. Music can be burned to CD/DVD format in compressed or CD audio format, MediaMonkey supports music playback using MP3, AAC, OGG, WMA, FLAC, MPC, APE, and WAV. It can adjust volume levels automatically using ReplayGain and MP3Gain, mediaMonkeys music library attempts to organize and categorize a users music collection. Upon installation it will scan the hard drives for music files. Ratings and playback information can be imported from other players such as Winamp. Podcasts are supported through the Podcatcher which allows the user to subscribe to podcasts that MediaMonkey will automatically download and it can also monitor the users hard drive to ensure that any changes are automatically updated in the library. MediaMonkey can sync music files with most portable devices including the Apple iPod, Apple iPhone, Palm Pre. MediaMonkey has support for third-party plugins to extend the base functionality, available plugins include a Last. fm scrobbler, a plugin to show lyrics, and a web remote-control interface. MediaMonkey also supports the Winamp 2 API, allowing a user to use any of the input, output, DSP. MediaMonkey was first developed in 2001 under the name Songs-DB, Songs-DB version 1.0.0 was released on October 12,2001. Development progressed steadily with version 1.1 released June 7,2002, Songs-DB1.1 was the first version to provide Winamp plugin support. Version 1.2 was released on July 3,2002 and included improved Winamp plugin support, significant UI improvements, version 1.3 was released on October 31,2002 and added Ogg Vorbis support and the ability to burn CDs. For version 2.0, Songs-DB was renamed to MediaMonkey, MediaMonkey 2.0 was released on August 25,2003. MediaMonkey 2.2, released on June 9,2004 and this synchronization functionality was extended to include syncing to actual iPods in version 2.4, released June 5,2005. The last major release of the 2. x series was MediaMonkey 2.5, MediaMonkey 2.5 added improved synchronization for all current iPod, Creative Labs, and iRiver devices, along with full FLAC support. Minor releases of MediaMonkey continued for the year, culminating in MediaMonkey 2.5.5 which was released on January 30,2007
29.
KMPlayer
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K-Multimedia Player is a media player for Windows which can play a large number of formats including VCD, DVD, AVI, MKV, Ogg, OGM, 3GP, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, RealMedia, FLV and QuickTime. It has a significant user base and has received ratings and reviews on major independent download sites like Softonic. KMPlayer was originally developed by Kang Young-Huee and was first released on 1 October 2002, on 5 March 2008, The KMPlayers Forum announced that the KMPlayer had been acquired by Pandora TV in August 2007. KMPlayer is known under several names, in version 3.0.0.1438, the player is labeled both KMPlayer and KMP on its main user interface. The About page refers to it as The KMPlayer Professional Media Player, the version page refers to it as KMPlayer. The license page says, Introduction of KMP KMPlayer, KMP is a freeware and its full name is K-Multimedia Player. But, it is called as KMP, KMPlayer, KMP Player or kmp player. The player handles a wide range of audio, video and subtitle formats and allows one to capture audio, video, internal filters are not registered into the systems registry in order to prevent the operating system from confusing system filters with K-Multimedia Players filters. KMPlayer 3-D KMPlayer supports 3D format videos with a low CPU memory share and provides an optimized, KMP Plus users can view 3D content with the 3D Movie Plus Apps library. KMPlayer Mobile App KMPlayer Mobile App was released on 15 March 2014 and it is available for Android and iOS devices. KMP Connect KMP Connect was released on 14 May 2014, which allows users to connect the PC version of KMPlayer to their mobile devices, users can stream any compatible video file they have on their PC to their mobile devices. Incomplete or damaged AVI files The player can handle locked media files while downloading or sharing, the player supports incoming streams delivered via HTTP. The player features an Async File Source filter for memory caching, compressed audio album support Shoutcast, Icecast DTS Wave, AC3, AAC, Ogg, Ape, MPC, FLAC, AMR, ALAC, SHN, WV, Module, etc. Google Video, Flash Video, Nullsoft Streaming Video, 3GP, PMP, VOB Real Engine + DirectShow QuickTime engine + DirectShow The MPlayer engine is supported, users can add external decoders to increase compatibility with many different kinds of files. Even though KMP is based primarily upon DirectShow, it supports Winamp, RealMedia and QuickTime with the default installation. Audio codecs, AC3, DTS, LPCM, MP2, MP3, Vorbis, AAC, WMA, ALAC, AMR, QDM2, FLAC, TTA, IMA ADPCM, QCELP, EVRC, RealAudio, etc. The path in which these plugins can be found and their corresponding settings can be specified, Winamp plugins, input, DSP, visual, general plugins KMP video plugins by SDK DScaler filter support In 2012, Lifehacker listed KMPlayer one of the five best multimedia players. The program earned a score of 4 out of 5
30.
Winamp
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Since version 2 it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community. Version 1 of Winamp was released in 1997, and grew popular with over 3 million downloads. Winamp 2.0 was released on September 8,1998, the 2. x versions were widely used and made Winamp one of the most downloaded Windows applications. By 2000, Winamp had over 25 million registered users, a poor reception to the 2002 rewrite, Winamp3, was followed by the release of Winamp 5 in 2003, and a later release of version 5.5 in 2007. Playback formats Winamp supports music playback using MP3, MIDI, MOD, MPEG-1 audio layers 1 and 2, AAC, M4A, FLAC, WAV, Winamp was one of the first widely used music players on Windows to support playback of Ogg Vorbis by default. It supports gapless playback for MP3 and AAC and ReplayGain for volume leveling across tracks, CD support includes playing and importing music from audio CDs, optionally with CD-Text, and burning music to CDs. The standard version limits maximum speed and datarate, the Pro version removes these limitations. Winamp supports playback of Windows Media Video and Nullsoft Streaming Video, for MPEG Video, AVI, and other unsupported video types, Winamp uses Microsofts DirectShow API for playback, allowing playback of most of the video formats supported by Windows Media Player. 5.1 Surround sound is supported where formats and decoders allow, Media Library At installation, Winamp scans the users system for media files to add to the Media Library database. It supports full Unicode filenames and Unicode metadata for media files, in the Media Library user interface pane, under Local Media, several selectors permit display of subsets of media files with greater detail. Adding album art and track tags Get Album Art permits retrieval of cover art, autotagging analyzes a tracks audio using the Gracenote service and retrieves the songs ID2 and ID3 metadata. Podcatcher Winamp can also be used as an RSS media feeds aggregator capable of displaying articles, downloading, SHOUTcast Wire provides a directory and RSS subscription system for podcasts. Media Monitor Winamp Media Monitor allows web-based browsing and bookmarking music blog websites, the Media Monitor is preloaded with music blog URLs. Winamp Remote Winamp Remote allows remote playback of unprotected media files on the users PC via the Internet, Remote adjusts bitrate based on available bandwidth, and can be controlled by web interface, Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and mobile phones. Plug-ins In February 1998, Winamp was rewritten as an audio player with a plug-in architecture. This feature was received well by reviewers, development was early, diverse, and rapid,66 plugins were published by November 1998. The Winamp software development kit allows developers to create seven different types of plug-ins. Input. Output, sends data to devices or files
31.
Rockbox
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Rockbox is a free and open-source software replacement for the OEM firmware in various forms of digital audio players with an original kernel. It offers an alternative to the operating system, in many cases without removing the original firmware. Enhancements include personal digital assistant functions, applications, utilities, Rockbox can also retrofit video playback functions on players first released in mid-2000. Rockbox includes a voice-driven user-interface suitable for operation by visually impaired users and these devices have relatively weak main central processing units, and instead offload music playback to dedicated hardware MP3 decoding chips. Rockbox was unable to alter playback abilities. Instead, it offered an improved user interface and added plug-in functions absent in the factory firmware. Rockbox can be flashed into flash memory on the Archos devices. Versions of Rockbox have since produced for more sophisticated devices. Rockbox is run from the drive or flash memory after being started with a custom boot loader, so to upgrade Rockbox, users need only copy the files onto the players drive. Reflashing is only needed when changing the boot loader, and on platforms is not needed at all. The first of ports, beginning in late 2004, was for the ColdFire-powered devices manufactured by iriver. About one year later, a port for the H3xx series became functional, in late 2005, work began on a port of Rockbox to Apples iPod portable players based on CPUs from ARM Ltd. incorporated into systems on a chip sold by PortalPlayer. Throughout 2006, Rockbox ports were available for a variety of iPod models. During this time, extensive work was conducted optimizing open source audio decoders for each of the ARM series processors, in 2008, porting began to processors based on the MIPS architecture. In 2010, work began on supporting hosted architectures where Rockbox runs as an application inside of more complex operating system, to date, all Rockbox ports have been accomplished by reverse engineering with little or no manufacturer assistance. As free software, many Rockbox developers and supporters hope to see official manufacturer support for new ports. Only a few companies have expressed interest in Rockbox, and none have officially contributed code to the project or included it with their hardware. The Sansa e200v1 port is the first to be started at the request of the hardware manufacturer, Rockbox is continuously developed, with new Git builds being released after every source change, and stable releases every 4 months for targets deemed sufficiently mature
32.
Lossy compression
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In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data encoding methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size for storage, handling, different versions of the photo of the cat above show how higher degrees of approximation create coarser images as more details are removed. This is opposed to data compression which does not degrade the data. The amount of data reduction possible using lossy compression is often higher than through lossless techniques. Well-designed lossy compression technology often reduces file sizes significantly before degradation is noticed by the end-user, even when noticeable by the user, further data reduction may be desirable. Lossy compression is most commonly used to compress multimedia data, especially in such as streaming media. By contrast, lossless compression is required for text and data files, such as bank records. A picture, for example, is converted to a file by considering it to be an array of dots and specifying the color. If the picture contains an area of the color, it can be compressed without loss by saying 200 red dots instead of red dot. The original data contains an amount of information, and there is a lower limit to the size of file that can carry all the information. Basic information theory says there is an absolute limit in reducing the size of this data. When data is compressed, its entropy increases, and it cannot increase indefinitely, as an intuitive example, most people know that a compressed ZIP file is smaller than the original file, but repeatedly compressing the same file will not reduce the size to nothing. Most compression algorithms can recognize when further compression would be pointless, in many cases, files or data streams contain more information than is needed for a particular purpose. Developing lossy compression techniques as closely matched to human perception as possible is a complex task, the terms irreversible and reversible are preferred over lossy and lossless respectively for some applications, such as medical image compression, to circumvent the negative implications of loss. The type and amount of loss can affect the utility of the images, artifacts or undesirable effects of compression may be clearly discernible yet the result still useful for the intended purpose. Or lossy compressed images may be visually lossless, or in the case of medical images and this is because uncompressed audio can only reduce file size by lowering bit rate or depth, whereas compressing audio can reduce size while maintaining bit rate and depth. This compression becomes a loss of the least significant data. From this point of view, perceptual encoding is not essentially about discarding data, green, and 50 pixels of blue vs. red, which are proportional to human sensitivity to each component
33.
Data compression
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In signal processing, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction involves encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Compression can be lossy or lossless. Lossless compression reduces bits by identifying and eliminating statistical redundancy, no information is lost in lossless compression. Lossy compression reduces bits by removing unnecessary or less important information, the process of reducing the size of a data file is referred to as data compression. In the context of data transmission, it is called coding in opposition to channel coding. Compression is useful because it reduces resources required to store and transmit data, computational resources are consumed in the compression process and, usually, in the reversal of the process. Data compression is subject to a space–time complexity trade-off, Lossless data compression algorithms usually exploit statistical redundancy to represent data without losing any information, so that the process is reversible. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistical redundancy, for example, an image may have areas of color that do not change over several pixels, instead of coding red pixel, red pixel. The data may be encoded as 279 red pixels and this is a basic example of run-length encoding, there are many schemes to reduce file size by eliminating redundancy. The Lempel–Ziv compression methods are among the most popular algorithms for lossless storage, DEFLATE is a variation on LZ optimized for decompression speed and compression ratio, but compression can be slow. DEFLATE is used in PKZIP, Gzip, and PNG, LZW is used in GIF images. LZ methods use a table-based compression model where table entries are substituted for repeated strings of data, for most LZ methods, this table is generated dynamically from earlier data in the input. The table itself is often Huffman encoded, current LZ-based coding schemes that perform well are Brotli and LZX. LZX is used in Microsofts CAB format, the best modern lossless compressors use probabilistic models, such as prediction by partial matching. The Burrows–Wheeler transform can also be viewed as a form of statistical modelling. The basic task of grammar-based codes is constructing a context-free grammar deriving a single string, sequitur and Re-Pair are practical grammar compression algorithms for which software is publicly available. In a further refinement of the use of probabilistic modelling. Arithmetic coding is a more modern coding technique that uses the mathematical calculations of a machine to produce a string of encoded bits from a series of input data symbols
34.
Multimedia
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Multimedia is content that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, video and interactive content. Multimedia contrasts with media that use only rudimentary computer displays such as text-only or traditional forms of printed or hand-produced material, Multimedia devices are electronic media devices used to store and experience multimedia content. Multimedia is distinguished from mixed media in art, for example. The term rich media is synonymous with interactive multimedia, the term multimedia was coined by singer and artist Bob Goldstein to promote the July 1966 opening of his LightWorks at LOursin show at Southampton, Long Island. Goldstein was perhaps aware of an American artist named Dick Higgins, two years later, in 1968, the term multimedia was re-appropriated to describe the work of a political consultant, David Sawyer, the husband of Iris Sawyer—one of Goldsteins producers at LOursin. In the intervening forty years, the word has taken on different meanings, in the late 1970s, the term referred to presentations consisting of multi-projector slide shows timed to an audio track. However, by the 1990s multimedia took on its current meaning, in the 1993 first edition of Multimedia, Making It Work, Tay Vaughan declared Multimedia is any combination of text, graphic art, sound, animation, and video that is delivered by computer. When you allow the user – the viewer of the project – to control what, when you provide a structure of linked elements through which the user can navigate, interactive multimedia becomes hypermedia. The German language society Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache recognized the words significance, the institute summed up its rationale by stating has become a central word in the wonderful new media world. In common usage, multimedia refers to an electronically delivered combination of media including video, still images, audio, much of the content on the web today falls within this definition as understood by millions. That era saw also a boost in the production of educational multimedia CD-ROMs, the term video, if not used exclusively to describe motion photography, is ambiguous in multimedia terminology. Video is often used to describe the format, delivery format. Multiple forms of content are often not considered modern forms of presentation such as audio or video. Likewise, single forms of content with single methods of information processing are often called multimedia. Performing arts may also be considered multimedia considering that performers and props are multiple forms of content and media. Multimedia presentations may be viewed by person on stage, projected, transmitted, a broadcast may be a live or recorded multimedia presentation. Broadcasts and recordings can be analog or digital electronic media technology. Digital online multimedia may be downloaded or streamed, streaming multimedia may be live or on-demand
