Open Source MP3 Player

1. Neuros to open source MP3 player blueprints
   Neuros Audio, the company behind the Neuros II "digital audio computer", has released the source code that underlies the hard drive-based music player's firmware to the open source community and has pledged to open up the device's hardware schematics later this month. We're willing to support the community in a way that not many HW companies are, including releasing documentation and even schematics in      addition to source code," said NA president Joe Born. NA has offered the Visual Basic .NET source code for its Neuros Sync Manager application for some time. NA's willingness to work with the open source world - not to mention the player's Ogg Vorbis support - has won it not a few customers from the Linux world.
                                                     
2. Open-source MP3 project continues
   Open-source software developers hoping to create a free replacement for the MP3 technology are pushing ahead with their project after the collapse of their parent, Webcasting start-up iCast. For the last few months of its existence, CMGI's iCast was the official home of the colorfully named Ogg Vorbis project, an attempt to create a digital music compression format that would sound as good as or better than the MP3 format but lack prohibitive license fees. Although most consumers view the popular online music technology as wholly free, companies that create software or hardware to play or encode MP3, as well as those that distribute MP3 downloads, must pay patent royalties. Webcasters ultimately will be in the same boat, probably as soon as next year. With the demise of iCast, a casualty of CMGI's recent round of belt-tightening, the Vorbis programming team was cut loose. It was allowed to keep all rights to its work, a provision that was part of its original deal in joining iCast, the programmers say.
                                                   
3. jlGui-MP3 player Applet Open source
   jlGui player Applet is the applet version of jlGui, Music Player for the Java™ platform, free, open source project. To play any MP3 or OGG Vorbis file/stream, you need a browser JavaSound 1.0 compliant : Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera ... with Java™ Plugin 1.3 or higher. jlGui 2.3.2 features :
   * Equalizer added for MP3 : Presets support (rock, classical, party, ...).
   * Seek support improved : Seek feature is now available for both MP3 and WAV audio formats.
   * Tag viewer improved to display ID3 tags, comments and meta-data for both Ogg Vorbis/Icecast and MP3/Shoutcast streams.
   * Skins support improved : Title marquee, loading and buffering messages, volume and balance bugs fixed.
   * Misc :pls support for playlist added, J2SE™ 1.5 ready. Speex audio format support.
                                     
4. Trio builds open-source MP3 player
   An MP3 player that is among the first designs based on Cirrus Logic's Maveric EP7212 processor has been built by Red Hat Software, Mojo Designs and Cirrus Logic. The three teamed up to use a combination of open-source operating system and graphical-user-interface tools with a proprietary graphical-interface library. They gave the player a small-footprint LCD touch screen as well as familiar icons for stopping, rewinding, fast-forwarding and playing music, and a simple address book and to-do list manager as well as an "About" screen that describes its various software and hardware components. The player was built using the Red Hat GNUPro development kit, DSP library and eCos real-time operating system (RTOS). It employs the latest version of Mojo Designs' Eyele GUI, a graphical-interface library developed from the ground up for low-cost, high-performance embedded systems.
   
   
5. MP3 owners get stroppy with open source coders
   MP3 Pro is proving just as popular as its predecessor - the MP3 digital audio format. Pro has only been available for just under two weeks, and the software has already been downloaded above 600,000 times. So says co-developer Thomson Multimedia, which posted demo software on 14 June. The demo release is limited to 64Kbps encoding - but can generate files half the size of a 64Kbps MP3 encoder.MP3 Pro was developed by Coding Technologies from the original work done by Thomson and Germany's Fraunhofer Institute. Essentially, it's about catching up with Microsoft's WMA format which has eclipsed MP3 in both sound quality and level of compression. That said, feedback from Register readers suggests that while MP3 Pro does indeed sound better than MP3, subjectively, WMA 8 has the advantage on quality.
                                                
6. Make a Home made, open source mp3 Player
   Home made, open source mp3 Player. The main goal of this project is to create an open design for a portable MP3 player, in both hardware and software. The secondary goal of this project is to make it as simple to construct, and as cheap, as possible. The design is based around the AVR Butterfly from Atmel. The use of this module greatly simplifies the hardware design and constrution and packs plenty of punch for $19.99 USD. The remaining hardware can be easily placed on a single sided PCB ($10-$20). The MP3 decoding is handled by a VS1001K decoder chip from VLSI Solution Oy ($20). This chip also has an onboard DAC with enough power to drive headphones, simplifying the board design even further.
                                                             
7. Tiny free open source MP3 player - STP
   STP is a tiny MP3 player program, with a very minimalistic interface - a small grey button in the taskbar by default. It is free, doesn't hog memory, and runs on even very old PCs. STP even runs well on a 486 computer apparently (that's pre-Pentium for those who weren't around then!). As well as the small taskbar button, it's also easy to switch to a Mini-bar player, which can optionally also be "docked" to the current window. This means that the slimline MP3 player "sticks" to the top of the program you're using, following it if you drag the window around. The STP MP3 player is now open source, and is finding it's way into the open source development community.
                                                         
8. Open Source Mp3 Player, Licenses Xing
   GoodNoise Corp has waded into the battle over the MP3 audio compression standard (CI No 3,529) with its FreeAmp MP3 player, which includes a decoder licensed from Xing Technology Corp. What makes FreeAmp particularly interesting is that like the Apache web server or Linux operating system, it's the result of an open-source development effort. GoodNoise is making FreeAmp available for download under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), which guarantees the freedom of users to share and change the software. Appropriately enough, FreeAmp 1.0 is available for Linux as well as Windows 95/97. The Xing decoder forms the basis of FreeAmp. This is believed to be the first time a company has licensed another company's software for inclusion in a product released under GPL. Xing evidently believes the benefits of inclusion in FreeAmp will outweigh the risks of publishing its software source code. 
                                                     
9. Buffer overflow flaw found in open source MP3 player
   A vulnerability found in open source MPEG audio player mpg123 received a "highly critical" rating on Tuesday from security information provider Secunia. The software vulnerability may lead to an exploit in which a specially crafted MP2 or MP3 file could cause a memory problem called a "buffer overflow" that could allow an attacker to run malicious code. Mpg123 allows users to listen to music and receive data streams from a server. But if they listen to music from a malicious server, then it could compromise their own system, said Thomas Kristensen, Secunia chief technology officer. The owner of the malicious server would be able to do actions like the user on their own system. Those actions could include taking control of a user's applications to send email -- perhaps aiding in identity theft or the spread of viruses -or alter files. However, Kristensen said the vulnerability may be difficult to exploit. 
                                                                 
10. The open-source mp3 music box
    mbux is a mp3, ogg, and flac music box designed for use at public places. A "public place" can be your private party or a real public place like a bar or a pub. Just a place or time where do you giving others the opportunity to select music but without giving them the total control over the music playing software. mbux allows the user to select songs from a big song list like every other player do, but it's allowing only adding songs to the playlist and not removing them. So everyone can add songs s/he like without being afraid someone else will delete it right after leaving the computer. After playing a song it's locked for a configured time. So no one can play the same song over and over.
                                    
11. Open-source audio wins MP3 player support
    Open-source audio technology Ogg Vorbis will get its first official entrée into a commercial portable MP3 player next month. Digital Innovations is set to release its Neuros Digital Audio Computer in March. The device, which will also support connections with Linux-based computers, may be the most open-source-friendly MP3 player yet released on the market. Emmett Plant, chief executive of the Xiph Foundation, the team behind the Ogg Vorbis format, said he signed the deal with Digital Innovations last weekend. This means Linux interoperability for a portable player that's supported by the manufacturer, not an after-market hack supported by some guy in Johannesburg with a dial-up connection and a copy of Emacs, Plant said in a letter posted on the Ogg Vorbis Web site. It means that you'll be able to go out and buy a portable audio device that will play Vorbis and support Linux at your local CompUSA.
                                                                         
12. Open Source MP3 Player Hits the Net
    In the world of computer operating systems, you've got commercial products from Microsoft, Apple, Be, Sun, and others in one corner, and open-source products like Linux in the other. The commercial products are released to the public as finished products (at least until the next "bug fix" is ready), usually for a fee, and their core software code is protected much like the recipe for Coca-Cola. If you don't work for the company producing the official version, then it's hands off. Linux, on the other hand, is available as open-source code for developers all over the world to tinker with, as long as they share their tinkering with the rest of the community. Among hard-core developers, this has made Linux the good guy in a field of greedy capitalists; computer industry analysts consider the open-source approach to be one of the few major threats Microsoft will face in the next few years.