dplayer - a directory player

dplayer is a simple music file player written in Java. Instead of using a sophisticated play list management or “my music” repository, it offers a simple file system browser to let you choose directories containing music files. This approach is very flexible and straight forward. No installation required and nothing is written to the file system (except a simple properties file).

dplayer is strongly inspired by the 1by1 player of Martin Pesch. The only reason to write an alternative to his player is the platform portability of Java. In other words: I wanted something like 1by1 on Linux.

dplayer is just acting as front-end to command line music file players. Currently it uses mplayer for music play-back. Theoretically, dplayer can be used on all platforms supported by mplayer like Linux and Windows (these two are tested).

For any contribution (question, error report, feature request, bug fix, …) feel free to contact me.

On the dplayer's home on SourceForge.net you may:

• report bugs,
• request features,
• download a binary or source distribution or
• subscribe to the mailing list.

(C) Tobias Winterhalter, Germany

19-03-2008 dplayer 08.03b19 is out…

I decided to release a beta version this time (b19). dplayer underwent a lot of refactoring under the hood. Especially the multi-threaded file scanner and an event-driven architecture made a lot of changes necessary. I expect quite some bugs :( But still, I use dplayer every day for myself and it has proven to be stable enough. The background scanner allows me to access my extensive music collection on a NAS system via WLAN with acceptable responsiveness. I can choose a folder to play within a few seconds. While playback starts, the scanner continues to scan all the other folders.

• I18N: currently available in English, French and German language
• supported music files: mp3, ogg, wav, … (theoretically all files that can be played by mplayer)
• display tag info if available (id3, …)
• play, pause and position within track
• skip tracks; this information is persistent between dplayer sessions
• repeat one or all tracks
• shuffle tracks
• reduce application to icon within system tray including play-back control via pop-up menu

• shipped with native executable (Win only)
• show cover as background (if available)
• if dplayer is called with directory or file as argument, start immediate play-back

• new native installer (Win only)
• new language: French
• Settings dialog: almost all settings can be controlled by the new dialog
• search path for covers: dplayer can search in several folders for album covers
• only one dplayer instance allowed: if dpalyer is called with a music file as argument while another dplayer is already running, the running dplayer will switch to the specified file and the second dplayer will terminate immediately
• multi-threaded: dpalyer will scan for music files in the background; this makes the GUI more responsive to user input, especially when dealing with larger music collections

• Windows or Linux operating system with Java Runtime Environment
• Java Runtime Environment >= 1.5
• working mplayer installation (s. http://www.mplayerhq.hu/)
  mplayer is available for various Linux and Windows operating systems
• ca. 4MB hard disk space

dplayer may be used under the GNU General Public License, GPL. dplayer comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.

You may download the dplayer source distribution or one of the binary distributions available for Linux and Windows. Please download the latest release from the Download page on SourceForge.net.

Building dplayer from source and some technical details.

dplayer comes as a simple zip file containing all necessary libraries. When downloading the binary distribution, you may choose between zip files for Linux and Windows platforms. Create a new directory, e.g. c:\Program Files\dplayer and un-zip the dplayer distribution file into it. That's it!

Since dplayer version 08.03 you may also download an installer for Windows. The installer will create the directory of your choice and optionally create shortcuts in your start menu and on your desktop.

If you meet the requirements mentioned above and the java and mplayer executables can be found in your environment PATH, you should be able to use mplayer without further modifications. On Windows, simply start dpalyer.exe to give it a try! On Linux, set permissions to execute the dplayer launch script (chmod a+x dplayer) and start it with ./dplayer.

If mplayer isn't in your search path open the Settings dialog and locate the mplayer executable in the programs tab.

For the time being no uninstaller is provided. Simply delete the directory under which you installed dplayer. dplayer does not change your system in any way (registry entries, …). If you chose to create shortcuts in your start menu or on your desktop simply delete them too.

Usage of dplayer should be intuitive enough to get along without a manual. Nevertheless, here are some hints:

On the left side of the main window, you see the directory browser. The content of a directory is only examined when it's opened or collapsed for the first time.

On the right side of the main window is the track list. Here you see all music files of the selected directory that dplayer should be able to play. You can double click on a file or press the play button in the tool bar to start play-back.

To speed up scanning of huge amounts of music files, dplayer can cache the tag information. When scanning a music file for the second time, dplayer will then use the tag information from the cache, instead of opening and reading the music file. The cache is also used to store some additional info per track, e.g. the playing statistics.

Caching is enabled by default. You can disable it within the Settings dialog. If caching is disabled, certain functions of dplayer, like persistence of skipping information (s. below), may not work. Depending of the amount of scanned files, the cache file may use several MB of hard disk space.

You can choose to skip tracks using the pop-up menu of the track table. If a track is marked to be skipped it will not be played and it is either displayed in gray color or not displayed at all. You can switch the display behavior with the “Display skipped tracks” menu item of the pop-up menu. If you select “Skip track” on a track that is already marked to be skipped, the skipping flag will be canceled. If caching is enabled (s. above), the skipping information is persistent between dplayer sessions.