Introduction

In the due course of things, I discovered that FMOD is a clumbersome, proprietary mess that only exists on Windows and Linux. While this means that the majority of PC users can potentially enjoy PsyMP3, this also means that there is a small set that cannot.

Details

Since PsyMP3 has a good percentage of it's code in FreeBASIC, this means that PsyMP3 is ultimately limited to the platforms that is supported by FreeBASIC; however, this includes operating systems not supported by FMOD.

FMOD is a core library that drives the entire music engine for PsyMP3; however, since FMOD is not open-source, it cannot be adapted to run on new platforms that FreeBASIC gains support for, nor can it have it's bugs fixed.

FMOD currently provides several critical components:

• An audio output engine
• A fast-Fourier transform engine, to drive the visualization
• A tag reader
• An audio decoder
• and a core "media player" engine to tie it all together.

Now, since PsyMP3 is a media player, the core "media player" engine that ties the other ones together is best implemented in the main PsyMP3 program. For the other systems, there are already open-source libraries available that we can use.

For an audio output engine, we can either use write our own thin library engine around the mpg123 output plugins, use SDL, use OpenAL, or libao.

For the fast-Fourier transform, I believe that FFTW (Fastest Fourier Transform in the West) would be the best choice, since it the fastest free and open source FFT engine available.

For the tag reader, we can use libid3tag (from MAD), or libID3 to read ID3 tags.

For the audio decoder, I want to use libmpg123 for MP3 audio, as it is the world's fastest decoder for ISO/MPEG Layer-III Audio, or maybe MAD, and libvorbis for, well, Ogg Vorbis. Other formats could be handled with ffmpeg/libavcodec and libFLAC.

This all considered, I have here a set of links to the websites for all the aforementioned libraries. If anyone thinks they can help, drop me a line.