An important note for existing Aural Player users
Upgrading from v2.2.0 or an older version ? Please read this important note, otherwise you will lose your previous app settings.
Overview
The way that Aural Player reads tracks of non-native audio formats (e.g. Vorbis, APE, True Audio, WMA, etc) has completely changed (improved). This has resulted in an improved user experience.
Real-time playback
Aural Player is now able to decode and immediately play non-native tracks without any delay. So, the user experience is now identical to that for playback of natively supported tracks, and doesn't require a time / storage overhead for transcoding like before.
Faster and more reliable loading of metadata
Now, metadata is read directly from the tracks on disk. This is much more efficient and reliable, and doesn't require storing temporary files on disk.
How ?
Previously, Aural Player spawned an instance of ffmpeg as a child process, to transcode non-native tracks and read metadata from them, and parsed textual data from ffmpeg before those tracks could be loaded into the playlist and played back. This was slow, computationally expensive, somewhat unreliable (due to inter-process communication), and required extra storage (for temporary files). It was also much more complex from a development / testing / maintenance standpoint.
Now, Aural Player makes direct calls to ffmpeg's libraries in-process, no longer needing to spawn a child process.
Other changes
- Removed support for raw DTS files (.dts)
- Bug fix: Tool tips for buttons in player view weren't being shown.