#alsaplayer — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

Bash csh zsh ksh tksh fish are powerful

Entire networks can be controlled and build with them.

Let's take for example command line tools to control media output

For me e.g mplayer and vlc -I cli are much more interesting when it comes down to standard control of media playback. I prefer to use MOC (mocp) Music 🎼 on Console, instead of bulky RAM hungry programs, which go on the internet to fetch data that I never asked for and thus burn bandwidth

The memory footprint of Music on Console is so low that you can use it on a system which has been built more than two and a half decades ago.

The only graphical media playback program I know that can do that also has been written by my friend Andy Loafoe and that is alsaplayer

Andy programmed alsaplayer when he saw Delitracker playing on my Amiga systems
We're talking the period when Linux was barely moving in Xwindows when you had window managers like fvwm twm and few others.
The alsa audio interface was also just Born.

It is within this context that Andy envisioned alsaplayer. It should be modular just like delitracker Amiga, it should be lightweight daily tracker runs on an Amiga 500 with just half A megabyte of chip ram
That should still be memory left to do other the things so straight calls were made to widget libraries.

Within a few weeks to a few months of coding alsaplayer came out of Alpha and went Bèta in code stability.

Because everything was written with efficiency in mind and it was programmed as portable as possible, alsaplayer can still be used many decades after It has been written, one of the main reasons is that it has been coded by a command line programmer

#programming #Bash #csh #zsh #ksh #tksh #fish #alsaplayer #MOC #mocp #VLC #widgets #libraries