Contents

General overview

Keyboard commands

Options Dialog

Playlist


General overview

XTC-Play The final chapter is a general purpose module player to play tracker based files as MOD, S3M, XM, IT, compressed files such as MPG and standard files such as WAV, VOC. As it is currently a beta version, it only supports MPG, WAV and VOC files (and playlist files .pl and .m3u).

The player uses .design files for ist outlook. They contain references to bitmaps and coordinates which represent buttons such as play, pause, stop and so on. The .design files were developed by Aka (creator of YAMP) and they can be obtained from his homepage http://www.tu-chemnitz/~aka under the section YAMP additional designs.

It also uses plugins for visualization that are used in WinAmp und ModPlug. Plugins are DLLs that can be loaded at runtime into the player using the options menu. They usually visually display FFT data or oscilloscopes in some way.

And of course you will get the latest version of this player at http://sanction.homes.pages.de.


Keyboard commands

Esc	Stop song

Ctrl-Left	Previous song in playlist

Ctrl-Right	Next song in playlist

Ctrl-K	Toggle Plugin

Left	Rewind

Right	Fast forward

D	Disk operations

H	Help

I	Song information

L	Playlist

M	Minimize

O	Options

P	Pause/Resume


Options

The Options dialog is subdivided into 5 notebook controls:

Output	Everything concerning the output device and MPEG decoding quality

Buffering	Allows adjusting buffer size for continous playback while multitasking in Windows

Plugins	Plugin setup. Test and configure all Winamp compatible plugins.

Design	Select your favorite player design.

General	General options such as playlists, drag&drop, ...


Options (Output)

Here you can change the output device and the MPEG quality. You can change the device while playing but when changing MPEG quality you have to reload the file. Reducing quality to 22kHz/mono will bring the best performance/quality setting for slow computers.

Back to Options


Options (Buffering)

Adjust buffer size for your needs. You usually should have no need to resize the buffer. One second will take up to 176kb of memory.

Back to Options


Options (Plugins)

Just specify the path to your Winamp\Plugin directory and press Reload. Then you can choose any plugin / module, configure it and test it.

When you use fullscreen plugins it is recommended to use Ctrl-K to turn the plugins on/off.

The priority boost should be left Idle. But when you use a plugin having DOS windows open or doing some very intensive calculations, you should increase priority to some points above normal.

Auto execute on play will start the plugin each time a new file is loaded and played.

The HDB analyzer has some KNOWN problems. All other plugins should work. When you have plugins that are smaller or bigger than Winamps one, you could see strange things happen when they try to resize itself... but ... it works...

Back to Options


Options (Designs)

The design of the player is based on .design files. They contain informations about the background, the buttons, the text fields and many other things (such as shapy windows). These .design files were introduced by Aka, the programmer of Yamp. You can obtain many many many .design files on his homepage at http://www.tu-chemnitz/~aka under the section YAMP additional designs.

You can also use Winamp skins: Just download Yamp 3.0 and use the converter to convert skin files into the .design files with their appropriate bitmaps.

Paths: .design files are stored in the folder you specify in the dialog. Its bitmaps are usually stored into \Designs\<name>\<bitmap>.bmp.

Back to Options


Options (General)

Clear playlist on... will remove all files from playlist before the action is started.

Window always on top will keep XTC-Play the topmost window. But take care: You must click on it to use keyboard commands (or select it via task manager).

Back to Options


Playlist

Playlists are a set of files that are played continously. They can be loaded and saved in playlist files with the extension .pl. Keyboard commands such as Ctrl-Left and Ctrl-Right navigate through the list. Double clicking or pressing ENTER on any item will make this item the current.

You can also drag&drop files to the player. Just let them drop over the player or the playlist window and they will be added to the playlist. Use Options (General)to specify whether the playlist has to be cleared before drag&drop.


Song information

Currently not available. Sorry ;-(