MPLAY was not initially released as MPLAY. On April 29th in 1999 the application called EricPlayer was released in 0.1beta state. It was originally made just for fun; a joke-application for my friends. EricPlayer was a very basic mp3 player with the odd feature of a looped movie of Eric (you know - the jeans manufacturer Levi's commercial mascot!) moving to the music.
| EricPlayer 0.1beta had no functional counter display, it did not support volume adjustments, the slider was not functional and it required songs to be located in a 'Songs'-folder (no drag-and-drop). And it had several crashing bugs! But it was great fun to view Eric moving and grooving to the music - sometimes it looked just like it was in sync (which it wasn't!). Here you can view the very first splash screen. |
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| Only a few days later, the constant crashing forced me to upgrade the application the EricPlayer 0.2beta. The major difference was less crashes, but if you look closely at the screenshots you'll notice minor changes in the interface as well. EricPlayer did not have it's own website - instead I uploaded the application to a few Hotline servers. I was a bit afraid of distributing it officially, since I used a movie clip of 'Eric' without Levi's approval. But it was great fun to watch Eric headbanging to my mp3s, so I decided to keep him anyway. Tricky situation! A friend of mine suggested that I should contact the Levi's Corporation to get their approval, although I still doubt that they would have approved. |
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Moving on to the final EricPlayer release (May 7th, 1999) - EricPlayer 0.5beta - we have a functional counter at last. The look of the buttons is slightly changed, and the in-joke name of the TV-screen has changed from CONY to SONYO (I don't know if anyone ever noticed this). |
| "EricPlayer is Dead – Long Live MPLAY!" |
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On May 11th, 1999 MPLAY was born. The initial release of MPLAY recieved the same version number as of the last EricPlayer release; 0.5beta. In fact, it was basically the same player, with a new design... and no Eric! In a way, it was EricPlayer's strict cousin that saw the light of day. The objective of the design was quite clear; unlike EricPlayer, this new player should have a clean and sober design. Of course, the splash screen was changed as well. |
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I made a simple website to host MPLAY and quite soon the requests came dropping in from users. I was thrilled that anyone, besides me, actually used this mp3 player (keep in mind, though, at this time only a handful of mp3 players existed)!
As requests increased in number, so did the features in each beta. And with every new feature added, a few new bugs was added as well. At this point, features was added at fast pace!
| The 'ErPl' creator code Ever wondered why MPLAY uses 'ErPl' as its creator code instead of MPLY or something similar? It's the legacy of EricPlayer! In fact, when MPLAY 0.5b was released - and for a while co-existed with it's 'cousin' EricPlayer 0.5b - they were playlist compatible! |
"The Long Road to 1.0" (a.k.a 'the Big Bug Bash')
The road to version 1.0 would prove to be a long and winding one, cornered by mysterious bugs and crashes. At one point I was ready to drop the whole project, frustrated by the numerous bugs, but somehow I persisted. Below is the abbreviated history:
beta 0.6 - (June 7th, 1999) Access slider and a simple volume control added. Followed by 0.6.1 (bugfixes), 0.6.5 (support for other audio-formats besides MP3) and 0.6.6 (ID3 v1 support), 0.6.7 and 0.6.8.
beta 0.7 - (July 1th, 1999) The Preference-window was added together with features like 'Append playlists', 'Autoplay loaded playlists', 'Random playback' and 'Helptexts'. 0.7.1, 0.7.3 and 0.7.5 followed shortly (with 0.7.5, offering the 'Appearance' feature; a predecessor to skins; you could change the appearance of the slider and the buttons)
beta 0.8 - (Aug 25th, 1999) Support for video added. The multimedia angle of MPLAY was taking form and the subname was changed from 'MPEG Audio Player' to 'Multimedia Player'. Screen-redrawing techniques was improved to make the MPLAY window flicker less when updated. Those techniques also made way for skins...
beta 0.9 - (Sept 3rd, 1999) Support for skins. I was skeptical about skins for a long time; I was afraid MPLAY would lose it's original design. But this was an increasing demand from the users, so finally I added skin support. Now it was possible for anyone to change MPLAY's appearance (which of course ended up proving to be a quite nice feature). Now, EricPlayer's gray and boring cousin could look colorful and wild, as well!beta 0.9.1 - (Sept 22nd, 1999) Support for audio mixing. The 'Mix-In' pop-up window saw the light of day (the predecessor to the TrackMixer window of today). It just contained one element; an adjustable value for the audio overlap of two songs. But the feature was very cool and suddenly MPLAY was one of very few players that could mix together two different MP3 tracks.
The 0.9 beta stage was a bug hunting process lasting from Sept -99 to mid-December -99. Following 0.9.1 was 0.9.2, 0.9.3, 0.9.4, 0.9.5, 0.9.51, 0.9.6, 0.9.7, 0.9.8 and finally 0.9.85. It was an open war against bugs and when 1.0 was released I was very satisfied with the result. MPLAY had grown a lot on the way thanks to interested and devoted users that kept sending me bug-reports and suggestions.
"A life after 1.0"
Now with 1.0 finally released, I though the toughest part was made. I could now concentrate on something else and just make small corrections to MPLAY (well, I was wrong... AGAIN)!
In the following two years the followers 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6 was released and more features were added in each version. Some memorable moments are:
Version 1.2 - (April 14th, 2000) Massive update which included the built-in ID3-tag editor and QuickReference. The Track Mixer was also updated with more controls. In the 3rd revision of version 1.2 selectable scan depth on dropped folders was added, as well as support for ID3 v2 tags.Version 1.3 - (June 2nd, 2000) introduced the Tools menu for the first time. Also introduced was individual settings for stereo balance, bass and treble - finally!
Version 1.3.5 was cancelled before release.
Version 1.4 - (June 30th, 2000) The major new feature was the 'fade-out on stop/skip'-function.
Version 1.5 - (Dec 6th, 2000) MPLAY goes shareware! I finally decided to make MPLAY a shareware application. I came to the point when I had to choose between stop developing MPLAY or charge for it. Also new in this version was VU meters and that the 68k version was discontinued.
Version 1.5.5 - (Dec 21st, 2000) Major new feature; the Trim function.
Version 1.5.6 - New Years Eve, 2000) Before I want to party I released a minor update (bugfixes and optimization).
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This version proved to be the most long-lived of all. With only minor revision updates during 2001 the final 1.6.2r3 version was released on Feb 14th in 2002.
That leaves us today with 1.7, and the road has truly been long! But as they say; "the goal of the journey is not the destination, but the journey itself"...
-- deepNiner