For a while there have been many threads where people suggest new ideas for audio utilities, plugins, front-ends, etc. and I thought it might be nice to start a thread where everyone could post these ideas/suggestions all in one place. It would be nice to see what everyone in the audio community needs/wants at this point. Perhaps interested developers might read the thread and it might spur some development. As a programmer myself, I'd like to see people's ideas since I believe there are lots of great minds out there with good ideas and we can never have too much innovation or creativity on the board.

Nick

Well, I need a program that can decrypt and rip the LPCM audio on DVD-Audio discs... I hope someone takes it into consideration and solve/fix it...

As the IT Director at a student-run radio station, I absolutely know what I would like in a software program. I would write it myself, if I had the coding skills to do so (which I don't have).

Currently we use Winamp to play random MP3's when there aren't any DJ's in the studio. I would like another program (or plugin) that did the following things:

- Plays random MP3's and keeps track of what has been played and how much, so MP3's don't repeat too often.
- Pick a random station identification mp3 and play it every 15 minutes or so
- Play an "ad block" every half hour of 3 or so random commericals, show ads, etc.

Anyone know of a program that does this? For free would be nice too, since the student government hasn't been too kind with their budget they give us as of late. I would be so happy if someone wrote a program that does this.

Hmm...an MPC plugin for Nero would be really slick.

Does Nero provide a framework for creating plugins? If so I'd probably be interested in making something like this.

Nero does support a plug-in architecture, as advertised on the Ahead Nero Hompage. I'm unable to find any white papers or implementation documentation, however. Perhaps it's only meant for Ahead to release upgrades to their core software? I don't know.

I believe a lot of these features are offered by Shoutcast or Icecast, two free MP3 streaming products. Several online radio stations I've heard use these products, along with free plugins, to do station identification, random MP3 playback without repeat until the whole playlist has been played, and probably your "ad block" feature as well.

Although these programs are designed to pump out an MP3 stream, you could easily take the output and send it over the airwaves instead. It might take some knowledge of scripting to get the programs to do exactly what you want, but no extensive programming should be required.

I think this program will do what you want, its not free tough.
http://www.raduga.net/home.htm

An audio utility I haven't seen yet is the collection of meta data from the music file by computer analysis. The type of meta data collected would be variables such as BPM (beats/min) and average loudness at various frequencies.

This data can then be used to classify music similar to a genre based system, except it won't be so subjective.
This would be great if this utility could be invoked during the coding process, and the metadata stored as a tag in the audio file.

The tag could then be read into a database and used in selective playlist creation in jukeboxes etc.

Someone was asking about this sort of thing in sci.stat.math today (Statistics Tool for Classification/Clustering).

ff123