I'm planning to launch soon an online music store. The Internet site is currently under construction, and in addition to this web site I would like to offer the top the customers of the store the ability to download (for free) a player that would provide :

• Basic player functionality (multi format, playlist management, library management, visualisation, album art display, etc. ....)
• http brower so has to provide contextual acess to the web site and links to albums review, artists bios, etc. ....

I have been considering several options among the following :

• Partnership with an existing company (eg. Winamp, etc. ..) to distribute a customized version of their player from my site
• Builing from an open source platform
• Building from foobar, as i am convinced it has the required capability, but considering however that heavy customization is required (UI for instance) to make it more fancy for a general non-technical audience

Now the questions for which I would like to get HA members opinions are :

• What is the best open source platform that I could build from ?
• Is Foobar suited for this kind of distribution from a legal point of view. Can I distribute the core and some customized components (reusing available plugins code) without any issue regarding copyright, licensing, etc... ?
  Please note that I am already aware of format licensing issues (mp3, aac, etc....) which I'am currently addressing

Please also note the customization I intend to develop is mostly user oriented and without going to shiny should include vis, skins, playlist and library management, album cover view ...
Thank you

Maybe you could try RadLight 4 ( http://www.radlight.net/download/unstable/...PREBETA1b13.exe )

It's very easy to replace the current User interface with your own. Also, the HTTP browser module should be a 5 minute thing for any average programmer

Foobar is definitely more than you want to throw at an MP3 n00b.

TCMP is the video player with the widest support for different audio formats, has a playlist and all the other stuff you are requesting, and we have skin makers in our team ......

To expand upon Chris.... The Core Media Player 5.0 will be an fully Open Source Directshow based media player. The bad side is that we do not expect to have a 'public' version ready till fall/winter. Though from early testing it seems that this maybe more sooner then later.

If you are looking for a media player to customize and partner with TCMP4 is also a great alternative as well. Although it is not currently Open Source.... this will be changing with an upcoming release before the first TCMP5 is released. What this means is if you need the source code... np as we can just bump up our plans to go OS with TCMP4.

If you are familar with our SDK you will see creating and customizing TCMP is pretty easy and straight forward. Have a look:
http://corecodec.homeunix.org:8884/plugins/TCMP4_SDK.rar

i would go with foobar for sure, i think the interface is perfect ... but if you wat something more "winamp", why don't you offer 2 options?

kwanbis.... there is a basic licensing issue when distributing like NEMO7538 is asking and it is the onloy reason why I even interjected to comment on Christians post...... for better or worse directshow is the only means to do this w/o paying serious cash for MPEG Licensing.

I'll give you a 'real world' example.... and since the deal has fallen through i can talk about it now. CoreCodec and PocketMVP was approached by a MAJOR hardware vendor to customize and distribute it with all the pocketpc's that used their chipset (no names). After we gave them a price for all the licensing for basic MPEGLA/MAD Decoder licensing they were SHOCKED at a price tag of over $250,000 as a base price... so they went to use a vendor that used the MS API's in their player instead. It was a simple matter of costs... and to be exact the software vendor that used the MS Api's was 1/16 the cost.