Xion Community

It's fast, it's functional, and it looks damn good.

In terms of strict audio player-ness, I'd say it actually beats Winamp and Foobar. But I do a lot of iPod synching and video watching, and I usually don't do with two programs what I could do with one, so for now, Winamp still takes the overall cake. Of course, that's just in my case. As I said, you've made an awesome audio player here.

If this would better be put in Suggestions/Ideas, I apologize, but perhaps video and device synch support would be something to look into if you're looking for a larger userbase.

Nevertheless, for what you made it to do, it rocks.

Nice work

Ipod stuff would be great.

As far as video content, that would bulk up the player. I use VideoLan for Videos and Xion for music. I only say that because each player has strengths all their own and to be honest, I wouldn't use Xion for video over VLan.

Now, perhaps if Xion loaded movies and forwarded them to another player? Maybe even use Mplayer's video window and Xion's controls could control Mplayer's playback.
I'm talking the windows port of the Linux Mplayer

Amarok, another linux music player, was confronted with the same question. To build a video player into it. They decided to stick to music since there was already vid players for Linux (reinvent the wheel thing)

There are of course other ways Xion could interact with video playback, again the Mplayer method, or WMP10 or 11's video control. (just thoughts )

My aim with Xion was to do music and to do it well. I think that moving into video might pollute Xion a bit and would definately bloat it.

Once I release the Component framework, anyone is more than welcome to expand Xion and perhaps support some sort of video off handling like Nightbreed suggested.

For now, I'm going to stick with Xion the Audio Player

I have looked into ipod support before and do plan to add support, so keep an eye out for it in the next couple of releases.

Cliff

Again, there are great video players already out there. A program that sticks to it's outline is a well developed one.

I've seen programs go from doing one thing and doing it really well without overhead, then they go and add something that doesn't belong (that's when they label it as a power user feature )
That in some cases works fine, but it takes away from the original development goal of the app. Instead of developers concetrating on tightening up the app, they now have to bug the hell out of the new features... lol

I mean, technically you can fit a square peg into a round hole, but you're going to have to do a lot patching to get the hole back to it's original state. And it'll never be perfect again..

I agree completely, Nightbreed.

There is nothing worse that seeing an application go down the drain because it gets so diluted and filled with bugs due to all of the new features that completely remove it from its original function.

There have been HEAPS of feature requests lately, so I already have a huge amount of work ahead of me and I will have to careful choose the ones that will go in so that it fits with the rest of Xion.

I don't want to present the user with a million options just because I couldn't design it well enough to 'just work and work well'. For example, I built the MSN 'What I'm listening to' feature directly in so that it is seamless. If you ever use MSN, check that feature in MSN and then play something with Xion, it will automatically be sent to MSN. It just plain works

Cliff