I realise that FB2K development is not open source (yet, maybe never will be) and I respect the decision. At the same time I think that it will be mutually benefitial for the user and the developers to have users help in any way possible. Is there any way I, as a user can get involved in the development of FB2K? As a beta-tester or some other way?


Before someone suggests, donation may not be a good suggestion (for me) as I am this close to being declared broke by my wife

(\/)(\/)

Yes, I know the feeling. Money is a bit tight but brain power is available if needed for something. No not a programmer but will beta test or what ever. win98se if that helps any. Not a huge amount of time available but could "make time"
Let me know if there is something I can do to help.

Thanks for such a nice player.

Report _real_ bugs. (Not you misunderstanding what something does)

Make feature/improvement suggestions that work well, make sense, and are easy to implement.

Before I venture into that, it would be great to know the design philosphy behind FB2K. I have read a lot of the General forum postings and though I have come across things that the developer hates, I am not very sure what is his definition of good/useful. I know that asking for Win 9x support is considered sacrilege and that ID3v2 is considered evil.

So far I have found that the prefence is for non-gui related feature requests and there is usually no beta-tests (expect for build 6.0).

Anything else we newbies need to know before we dare to contribute?

Win9x versions exist, no? Peter didn't want them at first because he figured it would be a big hack to get Unicode working properly. Eventually, he figured out a way to ditch unicode altogether in the 9x builds.

Peter isn't the only one who considers ID3v2 a bad thing. Do a search or two on Hydrogen Audio for more reasons why.

There are no GUI features that foobar lacks, per se. I don't think the main interface will change at all, other than becoming replaceable.

There are many beta tests, they're just not advertised on the forum.

@All:
If you want to aid development and can code, code good, interesting plugins. The fb2k architecture is broad and versatile enough that you can do many interesting things with it.

Present plug-in ideas of mine:

Extending foo_history to allow for true shuffle play. The idea is that the entire playlist is randomized, then set as items-to-be-played in the history. Probably somewhat difficult, should involve getting permission from foosion first.

Simple component for controlling Windows Mixer volume via Foobar. Probably really easy.

An input plugin similar to CUE files, but able to properly store metadata, and possibly seek times/positions as well for slow-seeking formats. (Aside: I've noticed faster seeking in MPC/CUEs lately. Is foobar caching the seek positions or something?)

The one time I tried to override foobar's default play behavior, I ran into a bunch of problems. It just doesn't work all that well, because there's no way to specify what gets played next (excepting the playlist). You have to use a play_callback, but that's inefficient and generally poor design, because then you aern't specifying what should be played next, you get called when the next song gets played, and then you change it (stop it and play a different one). Goodbye gapless playback.

I agree with CuriOus_George on the feasibility of this feature given the current API. Nevertheless I would have no problem with completely handing this plugin over to someon else. In fact I'd rather appreciate that, as this isn't my main interest. It would also allow me to focus on foo_dbsearch and some other planned plugin, which I am not going to talk about now.

Looks like it's time to ask Peter for an SDK extension then, eh?

Wait... why not just go Playlist > Sort > Randomize? All your files are only on there once when you play in order.

No, it's time to wait for 0.7. Peter has already implemented my flow_control request, so it will be possible to implement a new flow_control and specify how songs are played.

That isn't a good solution for some people, including me, who DON'T want to mess up their playlist for any reason (one would be album based title formatting). I've never liked shuffled playlist (except for on parties et cetera), for the reason that it's not that easy find a particular song. Yes, I know I can use playlist searh, but it isn't always that comfortable than scrolling a few songs down, knowing that the song you're looking for is just there.