Submit portable freeware that you find here. It helps if you include information like description, extraction instruction, Unicode support, whether it writes to the registry, and so on.
I am Baas wrote:I am with guinness on this. But you could always add a note in the description bit about the PortableApps alternative. See Miranda IM for an example.
I believe guinness is saying to change it to XMPlay Portable and keep the person originally listed as the submitter, which is what I was originally suggesting.
This is a bit different than Miranda because we're dealing with major components of an app that don't work portably. XMPlay's entire audio library feature is useless using the current listing in PFC.
I believe guinness is saying to change it to XMPlay Portable and keep the person originally listed as the submitter, which is what I was originally suggesting.
I am Baas wrote:I am with guinness on this. But you could always add a note in the description bit about the PortableApps alternative. See Miranda IM for an example.
I believe guinness is saying to change it to XMPlay Portable and keep the person originally listed as the submitter, which is what I was originally suggesting.
This is a bit different than Miranda because we're dealing with major components of an app that don't work portably. XMPlay's entire audio library feature is useless using the current listing in PFC.
Well, I misread guinness's reply. I prefer the Miranda way. Having said that, should TPFC community agree with your proposal then you should point out that the original XMPlay is portable but not the library/playlists. Some users may still prefer XMPlay over XMPlay Portable.
Oh, I just noticed you went ahead and added a note about XMPlay Portable in the XMPlay DB entry. Is the issue resolved then or do you still expect a vote on this?
As a huge chunk of XMPlay's functionality is broken in the main version (and, thus, PFC's listing), I'm soliciting other opinions. As mentioned, this isn't comparable to Miranda since Miranda IM's zip setup is fully functional while XMPlay's is not. Thus far, you feel it is fine as is with XMPlay as primary and guinness agrees that it should be changed to have XMPlay Portable as the primary listing.
If I want something in PA format I can access it directly from the PA site. If the standard app is acceptable, I know it's available here. Even when I don't care.. it's nice to have a choice. There are times when I just want to avoid begging for upgrades in the "it will be available when it's available" line.
The automatic drive letter switching is a very important feature for portability in an app like this. Very important! No one wants to recreate playlists every time they switch PCs.
My way to deal with this problem: I use M3U Dropper (...used to do this manually) to create a "portable" playlist.
My guess is that XMPlay will add support for this in the future, but until then, the official release should still be the main DB entry, with PA version being mentioned as the "no headache" alternative.
Just my 2 cents...
joby_toss wrote:The automatic drive letter switching is a very important feature for portability in an app like this. Very important! No one wants to recreate playlists every time they switch PCs.
It's not just the default playlist. It's the library. XMPlay has a full-blown music library ala iTunes, Songbird, Winamp, etc that is stored as a full database sortable by Artist, Album, Song, etc. That entire feature is non-portable in the standard release and likely will never be made portable. It all works in XMPlay Portable.
However, also strange is that its not listed on the main un4seen site. A quick search of their forums points to the PortableApps version, not their own, and lists the same portability issue: http://www.un4seen.com/forum/?topic=12258.0;hl=portable
I'm fine with switching over to the PortableApps version. Library portability is one of my major problems with iTunes so I was sort of surprised that -- as mature as the program is -- XMPlay didn't already include support for this.
webfork wrote:I'm fine with switching over to the PortableApps version. Library portability is one of my major problems with iTunes so I was sort of surprised that -- as mature as the program is -- XMPlay didn't already include support for this.
It would be a bit more complicated to handle the choice between relative paths and full paths in the SQL database. Same reason Songbird doesn't support it but our Songbird Portable package (also with publisher permission) does make those changes to make it portable.
I would leave the main entry as XMPlay - the PA format is a variant that is more? portable. If other portabilised variants come along, perhaps X-XMPlay, they can be included under the same main entry without needing to create a new page. This would potentially save work in the long run as well as avoiding giving the impression that JTH's variant is more important than the original.
Craunch wrote:If other portabilised variants come along, perhaps X-XMPlay, they can be included under the same main entry without needing to create a new page. This would potentially save work in the long run as well as avoiding giving the impression that JTH's variant is more important than the original.
The problem isn't that we want to avoid favoritism, the problem is that the natively portable version is broken. I dislike pointing our visitors to something that's going to give them problems. Also, there's no issue adding an "alternatively, [portable variant] is also available" to the entry should that come along.
I've just done a very quick check on the latest version of XMPlay (3.7).
I extracted it to E:\rjs\downloads\XMPlayer\xmplay37
I ran it once to generate a .ini file which was written to that directory
I then edited the .ini file to change the following line:
WritePath=E:\rjs\downloads\XMPlayer\xmplay37\
to
WritePath=..\xmplay37\
I then re-ran it and the library and playlist files are now in the xmplay37 directory and the .ini file WritePath entry did not revert.
This suggests that it would not take much to render XMPlay portable; much less effort than using Universal Extractor as other programs listed here need at any rate. I can see that further investigation into this would be needed, but XMPlay looks to be portable enough to remain listed in its own right. I am not going to investigate this further myself as I dislike XMPlayer and will be deleting it in a few minutes.
Craunch position makes sense to me.