30.Apr.2022
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Mod-Player: HippoPlayer 2.52
Kari-Pekka Koljonen, the developer of the Amiga-MOD players HippoPlayer, has released an update to version 2.52. Changes:
New fixes:
- Simplify file loading so that compatibility with FTPMount is better. FTPMount does not seem to support file seeking properly. FTPMount can be used to access Modland with Hippo, for example.
- Fix crash with "Keep list on exit" when restarting in file browser mode and the directory has disappeared.
- Fix the move function losing the moved item if nothing is selected when trying to insert the item back. Now it is inserted to the beginning of the list.
- Kickstart 1.3: Fix the button and box frame graphics so that they look correct in terms of depth illusion.
- MP3 files with ID3v2 tag data did not get recognized and played previously. Now they should work.
- MP3 identification improved so that in addition to filename suffix ".mp3" also the prefix "mp3." is now checked. Additionally any possible ID3v2 tag data is is used to determine if a file is an MP3 file.
- There was a rather severe regression in v2.49 sampleplayer. Scopes didn't work properly and things could crash. Fixed these.
- Move "Button tooltips" Prefs button to the "Display" Prefs subpage, which is the correct placement.
- Sometimes when a module ends and the next one should be played, the next one is skipped and the one following that is played. Fixed!
- The play button icon had an extra pixel at the bottom. This went unnoticed until now, how is that even possible?!
New features:
- "Big buttons" option in "Prefs/Display". This doubles the height of the two button rows in the main window. May be helpful with higher resolution screens. The original icons were designed for the 640x256 resolution.
- Added support for launching HiP via "project icons". These are icons used for data files which specify the default tool which should be used to open the files. This is a very basic use case from the beginning of Workbench, finally supported.
- Patternscope support added to the THX/AHX format. Also shows transposes.
- Patternscope now displays note and sample transpose information for the Future Composer and the BP SoundMon formats as well.
- PreTracker support improvements
- Improved sample scope support
- Added support for the following players: Art Of Noise (4 channels), BP SoundMon (v2.0-v2.2), Future Composer (v1.0-v1.4), Game Music Creator, Hippel-COSO, JamCracker, PreTracker, SoundFX, StarTrekker
- Also added support for the new Eagleplayers.
- Fixed a problem where samples with short repeat lenghts were displayed incorrectly, this means every chip and synth sample in practice. The playback position was calculated wrong and resulted in an unrealistically static waveform display.
- Sidenote: It's quite interesting to see how synth formats look with scopes, as they deform and manipulate the waveforms in real time. For example, FC waveforms looks quite simple whereas JamCracker and Hippel-COSO look more complex. BP SoundMon seems to be in between these two.
- The "Freq. Analyzer" scope was removed. It was some kind of a histogram display of deltas of consecutive sample bytes, usually boring to look at and not that informative.
- A new scope "Spectrum" was added. The X-axis displays frequencies, low ones on the left, high ones on the right. The Y-axis displays loudness in decibels.
- Support for running multiple scopes instead of just one. There are now separate toggles for the five different scopes in "Prefs/Display". I tried to preserve much of the previous scope functionality. For example, the scope toggle with key [Z] and LMB on the left side of the infobox. Scope window positions and open status are preserved when Prefs are saved. However, when a module is played with no scope support the scope windows will no longer be automatically closed as was done previously. Having multiple scopes running required extensive changes, so there may be some new bugs lying around. Scopes are also quite CPU and blitter intensive so having many running on A500 will work but will also not be very smooth.
- New keyboard shortcut [SHIFT+F]: toggle favorite status for the currently selected module. (Plain [F] is find module.)
- Kickstart 1.3: The hippo head is now displayed! It uses the kick2.0 palette color order so it is ugly on kick1.3, and was never shown. Now the graphics is remapped during startup to make it displayable also on kick1.3. Cool :-D
Tips and tricks:
- Enabling "Doubleclick" in Prefs makes starting playback easier if you like using the mouse.
- Activating "Keep list on exit" allows you to conveniently continue here you left off in your module listening adventures when you start Hippo again.
- Hippo is fully keyboard controllable. A way to browse through a large mod collection is to switch to file browser using [SHIFT-M] and then using arrows, enter and backspace.
(dr)
[News message: 30. Apr. 2022, 11:24] [Comments: 0]
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