Interview with Niek Albers, creator of CoolPlayer
CoolPlayer is a popular modern MP3/OGG player, featuring freeform skins, a nice playlist editor (which inncludes multitagger), an mp3/ogg-to-wave convertor, support for winamp vis plugins and much more.
Why have you decided to create CP? There are lots of other MP3 players. What were the aims of creating one more skinnable player?
Niek Albers: I started developing CoolPlayer after the good old NAD (NAD was considered to be one of the most high quality players of its time. In those days Winamp used its old MP3 decoding engine, which decreased music quality - note by SacRat) player sold out and went over to sonique. I wanted to write a very small and fast freeware MPEG audio player that has just all the features I want. During development lots of people gave me ideas and bug reports so CoolPlayer became more and more steady. After the makeover it is possible to have freeform skins and new features keep coming each release. I hope I can keep releasing new version on a regular basis, but I never know what time will bring. We shall see.... In the end, there always remain a few...
Who is developing it?
Niek Albers: CoolPlayer was first solely developed by me. After working on it for over two years and getting numerous emails about the development I decided to go opensource for several reasons:
- The ability to have other people getting involved in development
- Keep up with development of competing software
- Include other opensource modules in the player
- Provide my share of knowledge
- Do less myself ;)
It took a while but as you can see now new CoolPlayer builds appear on a regular basis and there's a (small) team of developers working on it. Most new programming work has been done by Marcus Platts (the author of DreamRender.com) who's doing an excellent job on improving the player. Just to mention a few new features, MAD decoding engine (also GPL) by Rob Leslie who has provided the best mp3 decoding engine to date, high precision equalizer provided by Dmitry Vassiliev, OGG support, Winamp in-plugins support, new playlist etc. CoolPlayer has also become one the most favorite players in the skinners community, so many beautiful skins are available. The CoolPlayer Open Source Project tries to put the best code in the best place.
In a time CP has turned into something really interesting. A player itself is just a single executable file with the size less than a half of a Mb (less than 200Kb packed). All the needed information about íts configuration is stored in an ini file, so it could easily be used as a player for MP3 CDs. Quite a flexible and easy skin format has made CoolPlayer one of the favorite applications among skinners. Unlike Winamp, this player doesn't limit your imagination with a set of rectangles, so some skins for it are really awesome. So if you are not attached to any MP3 player like Winamp I'd recommended you to take a look at this small app. Believe me, it's worth it!
Niek Albers: Remember that CoolPlayer is already one of the older players around now. When I started developing it (somewhere in '98) there weren't many players around yet (fewer than 20 I'd say). CoolPlayer emphasizes on three levels: size, speed and stability.
And finally: It's all for free...
P.S.: if you wanna make your own skin for CoolPlayer, check this page: http://www.daansystems.com/coolplayer/tutorial.html and this: http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net to download the program itself.