Mastodawn

So I realize this is probably one of those things where you'll either be like meh, or ooh cool, but here's another thing I've been working on, mainly for my own personal use and a group of friends than anything, but I figured wtf, someone else here might enjoy this. This is #FastPlay, a little media player that I've been working on. It's not and will never be a full replacement for Foobar2000, and thus lacks things such as a converter and a media library, but has enough features I think for it to still be useful. It supports being able to be set as the default for formats, for example. I'll paste a bit from the readme here which explains what's unique about FastPlay: At the core of Fastplay are what we will call virtual sliders. Right now, there are two of these virtual sliders.
The first one adjusts things like your volume and any effects you choose to enable/add. You choose what this slider adjusts by using left and right brackets, and then adjust the value itself with up or down arrows.
The second slider allows you to do things such as seek and move between tracks. You adjust what this slider does by using comma and period, and you adjust the slider with left and right arrows.
You can choose what shows up in these sliders by heading to the options dialog, control comma.
More and download: https://masonasons.me/softs/FastPlay.zip

#FastPlay 0.4.0: Add speedy as another tempo/pitch algorithm.
Add reverb algorithm adjustment.
Correctly show midi format in the file formats tab
Add option to have FastPlay not automatically hide to tray.
Add new bookmarks option. Press M to place a bookmark at the current position in the file. Press control M to open the list of bookmarks. Press enter on a bookmark to jump to it, or press delete to remove it.
Attempt to fix internet streaming crashes.
Add the ability to record the player's direct output. Useful in many applications, recording internet radio streams, recording affected audio, etc. Press R to toggle recording. Set up options in the recording tab.
Add a radio dialog, for saving and quickly playing internet radio streams. Search tab coming soon.
Thread youtube search, so NVDA doesn't freeze.

https://masonasons.me/softs/FastPlay.zip

#FastPlay 0.4.1: Add toggle record and speak now playing as an available global hotkey assignment
Add new speech tab, with some new settings for verbosity.
Fix volume over 100 setting
Add shuffle
Fix a bug with tags where they were getting cutoff in some cases.
Adjust volume curve and step.
Fix flac playback by actually including the proper version of bassflac.
Add home to jump to the beginning of the file.
Add J for jump to time.

https://masonasons.me/softs/FastPlay.zip

#FastPlay 0.4.2: Add convolution reverb.
Add all files option to the open file dialog.
Add chapter seeking option.
in the speak now playing key, remove the now playing: text
Make it so shift numbers show a text field in a dialog with the tag that that number key would speak.
Add open folder option
Add playlist manager dialog, control P. Allows you to modify the current playlist. You can add files to it by pasting them, move them with alt up and down arrows, delete them with delete.

https://masonasons.me/softs/FastPlay.zip

#FastPlay 0.4.3: Add scheduler for scheduling playback/recording from within the app!
Fix a bug report where now playing song titles didn't continue parsing past an apostrophe character.
Add a keystroke, u, to mute the player. This works in such a way where recording the player would still work but you wouldn't hear the player output.
Add backspace to reset the current effect slider to it's default value.
Adjust it so that player volume does not affect recording volume.
More adjustments to volume curve.
Add volume step setting to options/playback.

https://masonasons.me/softs/FastPlay.zip

#FastPlay 0.4.4: Add an option to make playback rate adjust by semitones instead of .01X
Add a use legacy volume adjustment checkbox to advanced, for those who don't care about volume affecting recordings and want it to respond quickly.
Add an option to not show track filenames in the window title.
In addition to this, improve window title display so that it shows much more useful track information than before.
Fix the scheduler so that when set to both playback and recording, the audio is now correctly muted.
Add an import button to the radio dialog, for importing M3U or pls streams.
Add the promised search tab to the radio dialog, which lets you search RadioBrowser, TuneIn, iHeart Radio.
Adjust rate feature to not rely on the tempo algorithm being BassFX/Sound Touch.
Fix pasting into the playlist view.
Load folders from m3u's.

https://masonasons.me/softs/FastPlay.zip

#FastPlay 0.4.5: Legacy volume mode fixes. https://masonasons.me/softs/FastPlay.zip

#FastPlay update! FastPlay can now be found on Github! Here is a link to the latest release: https://github.com/masonasons/FastPlay/releases/download/latest/FastPlay.zip

Here's what's new in FastPlay 0.4.6: Attempted network buffering fixes.
Fix leading spaces in M3U favorites import.
F2 will let you update a station.

I have made building FastPlay as easy as possible for those that are interested. It's as simple as making sure you have the Visual C++ Build Tools installed, and then cloning/downloading the sourcecode, running download-deps.bat, and then running build_new.bat.

@Bri Can I ask why you're using an old version of SQLite from 2024 pretty much exclusively as a key-value store, nothing relational like SQLite was made for, without any transactions or proper error handling?

@TheQuinbox I figured it would be much faster than using something else, especially if users end up with shit tons of radio stations/stored files with positions.

@Bri @TheQuinbox Yeah, Sqlite really isn't bad at that, especially with proper indexing. Certainly better (and much more space-efficient) than a file system, especially for thousands of keys and smallish values.

I'd personally go relational, but I'm the literal definition of overengineering so...

@Bri If the goal is speed for simple path-keyed lookups, a structured file, embedded key-value store, or append-only log with an in-memory index would be just as fast or faster. SQLite's advantages show up when you use transactions, indexing, and query planning, not when you treat it like a big dictionary.

@TheQuinbox Ah, OK. Thanks for the tip. I just figured SQL since it's already got everything there for you, multiple tables per file, etc etc, I figured why reinvent the wheel.

@Bri Fair enough, and to be clear it does work fine. But it's definitely a bit overkill, and I'd at least use a newer version than 3.4.5 haha.

@TheQuinbox that's fair. I just thought ooh, single C file containing SQLite, nice easy dependency.

Brian Hartgen Jan 25

@Bri I like F2.

@brian_hartgen Yeah, the reason that came along was that I found when I imported my stations from an M3U file, they all had leading spaces, so I wanted a way to fix those manually.

Brian Hartgen Jan 25

@Bri Hi. I am finding that if I stream a station for about 10 minutes, there are audio artefacts. It is buffering quite a lot. This is not the case with other audio players so I know it's not the streams at fault. Is there anything I can adjust at this end to try to avoid that happening? Thanks.

@brian_hartgen What kind of audio artifacts are you experiencing? Stuttering or something else?

@brian_hartgen also, does this only happen with radio streams?

Brian Hartgen Jan 25

@Bri I can manually record the output for you as a sample if that would help. I will now check with regular audio files and report back.

@brian_hartgen ooh, yes please to both. I'm about to head off to sleep, so will check on this later.

Brian Hartgen Jan 25

@Bri Of course, I will test over the next few hours.

@brian_hartgen Sounds good!

Brian Hartgen Jan 25

@Bri It's just little breaks in the audio output. It is not severe but it is there. This occurs when recording or not, but interestingly, they do not appear in the actual recording.

Chloe Hodges (moved to a new account)Jan 25

@Bri @alexchapman Fast play (the name) somewhat reminds me of when I used to watch Disney DVD’s back in the day

https://youtu.be/ZUHTz2GQWz0?si=oPtVUeXnPlkjYN8w

Disney's Fast Play (2006)

YouTube

Tom Grant Jan 25

@Bri I'm loving FastPlay at the moment, it's so cool you can add all these effects to anything even URL links. I have been making music play all high pitched just for the hell of it and adjusting the rate gradually like running low batteries in a cassette player! hahaha. Thanks for keeping the keys very native to winamp and similar programs

@Bri Took me forever to find this link. Yay for the search function. Going to check out FastPlay now.

@Bri I tried to access the FastPlay download with all my browsers. Even Chrome on the iPhone. I got the. "This page can't provide a secure connection."

@NightDrake Try this: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/laafbf0j48x07cyilaioi/FastPlay.zip?rlkey=0eb0g8rxu4vsv5lsnnu67yshy&dl=1

@Bri Thanks! That did work. Is it going to be a pain in the ass to provide Dropbox links? I don't at all want to inconvenience you.

@NightDrake Oh no, not at all! Just a simple paste

@Bri Woohoo! And thanks for being considerate. Should I save that link? Or will it change every time there's a release?

@NightDrake Due to the stupid nature of Dropbox links, it will unfortunately change every time the link changes

@Bri I thought you might say that. But now that at least one person is having the issue I'm sure you'll hopefully remember to add them. I don't at all want to nag. That isn't what I do. 🙌

@NightDrake I might forget. I'm only human. But I'll do my best

@Bri Sweet. I'll ask then if I don't see a link. I've never at all thought humans forgot a thing. *teasing of course*

@NightDrake hahaha

@Bri Is there a file I can copy from TweeseCake that has my 60 something internet Radio station Bookmarks into Fast.Play? Or is copying the URL's and adding them that way the best way to go about it? I'm excited that it adds my stations URL's in alphabetical order. The little things and all.

@NightDrake Shoot. Unfortunately, no, you would have to add them all manually. Tweesecake has a custom format for storing radio stations.

@Bri Oh, that's fine. I'm not minding doing that at all. I just thought I'd ask. At least it's not thousands. So there is that.

@NightDrake True!

@Bri Is there a file I should save that has all the stations I've added just in case something messes up? So I won't have to do this again? Sorry for all the questions.

@NightDrake Fastplay stores it's stations in the fastplay.db file.

@Bri Sweet! Thanks. That's all the questions I have for now. I do hope I'm not bothering you. But tell me if I am.

@NightDrake not at all!

Peggy Kern Jan 26

@Bri @NightDrake I haven’t figured out yet how to add radio stations. I tried finding the stream links for a couple stations, with no success. Any suggestions how to go about it?

@Bri Good I could make you laugh. People don't laugh enough these days.

Peggy Kern Jan 26

@Bri @NightDrake Will fast play have an automatic updater the way fast SM does?

Keao Wright Jan 26

@kernsac @Bri @NightDrake that's what I'm wondering as well

Jonathan Jan 25

@Bri Something is quite off with the legacy volume, I've attached a recording, could get a bit loud. Basically enabling it just bumps the volume ignoring any volume changes afterwards.

@jonathan859 I got it. Fixing

Jonathan Jan 25

@Bri Great, thanks.

@jonathan859 OK, latest build should be good now. Sorry about that.

jade old account Jan 25

@Bri i can't download fast play it says the site can't provide a secure connection, usingoogle chrome

Joy Tilton Jan 25

@shefoof @Bri I was able to grab it using Brave. Firefox would not do it either. You may want to try ms Edge.

jade old account Jan 25

@tinygirl @Bri i can't get it with that either. same error

Brian Hartgen Jan 24

@Bri Better and better, looking forward to trying this out.

Brian Hartgen Jan 24

@Bri Mute works a treat and the scheduling options are very comprehensive.

@brian_hartgen Yeah. I figured someone would want to schedule something a very specific way, so I made sure that they could hopefully do so

Brian Hartgen Jan 24

@Bri What I like is that you've got the option to play the stream, record it or both. That's cool.

@brian_hartgen Yes. I figure someone might just want it to start playing something at a specific time and not record it.

@brian_hartgen Just be warned, I found a bug here. If you set it to record only, right now in the build you have, the audio isn't correctly muted. I've just fixed that now, so when the next build comes out it will correctly mute the audio when the scheduled event starts.