amiga-news.de - Audio playback: Interview on the occasion of version 1.0 of AmiModRadio

22.Jan.2025 Audio playback: Interview on the occasion of version 1.0 of AmiModRadio
Shortly before Christmas - after years of almost asymptotically approaching this version number - AmiModRadio 1.0 was released. Reason enough for us to ask its programmer 'Tygre' for an interview.

About the program: AmiModRadio accesses the more than twenty thousand music modules in Aminet, but also tens of thousands of tracks from Haxor.fi, Modland and Modules.pl, in order to download a piece of music, unpack it and play it on one of the playback programs such as AmigaAMP, DeliTracker, EaglePlayer, HippoPlayer, MultiPlayer or TuneNet. A rating function is also included. AmiModRadio is open source, the files are available on SourceForge and BitBucket. Anyone wishing to report bugs is asked to do so via the official bug tracker. Suggestions for improvement are always welcome.

Thank you for telling us more about your project. For a start, would you like to tell us a bit about yourself?

I'm a Breton, born and raised in Brittany, who has lived in Montréal, Québec, for 22 years (time flies!). I received an A1200 for Christmas 1993 (or was it 1994?), but I was already familiar with that awesome computer series thanks to my brother, who had had a C64 and then an A500 before that. Later, he also bought an A4000. I still have my A1200 and the A4000 (although the motherboard suffered from the infamous leakage of its barrel battery).

I used my A1200 all the way to my engineering school in 1998. I had augmented it with a Blizzard 1230 and two external harddisks connected via a ribbon cable sticking out from the A1200 case. Not very pretty, but working very well! In 2000, I bought my first PC (a Dell Inspiron) and I neglected my Amigas until 2009 or something, when I rediscovered the joy of simple computing. :-) I refurbished my A1200 but also started buying other extensions and Amigas. Now, my main Amiga is an A1200 with a Blizzard 1240, a CompactFlash card, an Ethernet card, and other goodies, all sheltered in a beautiful Evo X500 black case.

When did the work on AmiModRadio start?

In the 2010s, I was looking for a project to pick up and improve my Amiga programming and, of course, to use my A1200! I had always enjoyed Amiga music and realised that there was no convenient way to play all the modules in Aminet - the idea for AmiModRadio was born!

How was this idea implemented then?

Early on, I realised that I didn't want to program a new player (I was just not a good enough programmer!) so I decided to use ARexx, which brought many benefits: AmiModRadio can interact with most module players out there! Also, ARexx is very cool and versatile and I miss it on Linux and Windows.

Besides that, AmiModRadio is entirely programmed in C, and uses its own FTP and HTTP/HTTPS code to download modules. I wanted to learn socket programming and the intricacies of all these protocols! It also includes four different user interfaces: textual (CLI) and graphical (ClassAct, MUI, and ReAction), which share the same base code.

I couldn't have developed AmiModRadio without the community's help, in particular, on EAB, who patiently answered my many questions... or helped with translations and testing (in particular 'AmigaSystem'!).

Did you originally have different plans for the project?

Actually, AmiModRadio today is pretty much what I had in mind these many years ago... I just didn't know that it would take me 13+ years to complete. :-D AmiModRadio grew a little bit beyond what I had in mind at the beginning: it uses different tasks, so that the UI stays responsive even during the download and unarchiving of modules, and it has a companion Web server to store/retrieve/display ratings.

Regarding features: is the project finished?

Yes! I'm pretty happy with the state of AmiModRadio now... I actually use it every day on my A1200 or on the FPGA Arcade in the living room (to my daughters' horror! :-p). It is stable, doesn't crash, and doesn't corrupt the system... as far as I see! I'll improve its user interfaces and inner workings, but nothing major should change... Until someone reviews my code and tells me all the things that I did wrong...

Are there any other plans?

Actually, yes! :-D

First, I'd like to complete the reprogramming/conversions of the programs published in Amiga News Tech (ANT) in the 1990s for VBCC. VBCC is an amazing compiler for the Amiga (and not only the Amiga) and the programs in ANT have a lot to teach (me).

Then, I was talking about Linux and Windows above... One thing that I miss from Windows is the possibility of creating shortcuts simply. I'm currently developing WBShortcutMaker (working title!) that would create, in the WBStartup, shortcuts to any program: You would select a program that you'd like to run at startup and, with a click or a menu or something (I haven't figured it out yet), WBShortcutMaker would create a script in your WBStartup with icon and all.

Also, I have kind of abandoned AmiAutoUpdater for a long while, which was my naive attempt at a kind of package manager... or rather software updater! I'd like to take that up again, but first I should try Grunch, which may do exactly what I want (and more).

Finally, I'd like to fix my A1200, which used to host my website thanks to THTTPd, but that recently stopped working: I suspect that the CF card failed but I haven't taken the time yet to investigate! (snx)

[News message: 22. Jan. 2025, 09:44] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]

Prior message >