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Comment by reiichiroh | Hacker News Reader

What ever happened to Sonique?

For years it was the only player that could also handle digital tracker (.mod, .s3m, .xm, .it, etc.) files more or less correctly. In those days, downloading a 100k .mod file over my dial-up or a 5MB mp3 was a big deal and being able to find lots of cheap music that was also light on the bandwidth was invaluable.

I loved Sonique.

In addition to trackers, didn't Sonique sound better than Winamp?

In my very hazy memory, Winamp used less memory, but Sonique sounded a lot better.

In addition to trackers, didn't Sonique sound better than Winamp?

Same thing with XMPlay [0]. Much better sound (me thinks).

[0] http://www.un4seen.com/xmplay.html

According to Wikipedia, sold to Lycos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonique_%28media_player%29

I absolutely loved that player. I actually STILL use it. It runs really nice under wine.

I thought about doing a clone of it and making it open source under the GPL but I'm still not quite as productive as I can be in C yet.

Then use something else than C? I mean, there is a ton of players written in Python using GTK and GStreamer.

I like C. I like its performance and its syntax. Call me crazy.

edit: It's not that I don't like Python. I think it's a great scripting language. But for me, it's just too slow. Speed is important to me.

A key part of a lot of these pygtk players is that they rely on gstreamer to do the heavy lifting. Organizing a pipeline of "this source, this format, that sink" is not a performance problem -- it's a plumbing task. :)

well, it's not just the "plumbing" thing. I still have to worry about animation, loading the application, playlists, etc.

I understand Python could be a good choice and, yes, I agree it would be "easier". But jeez you know.. I just want to use C damn it. I want complete control over the memory. WHY CAN'T I JUST USE C?!! haha

If you'd written the python version and had profiles showing it was too slow, I'd believe you.

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