fmedia - media player/recorder/converter

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smaragdus
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fmedia - media player/recorder/converter

#1 Post by smaragdus »

Synopsis
fmedia is a fast asynchronous media player/recorder/converter for Windows and Linux. Its goal is to provide smooth playback even if input device is very slow and unresponsive. The architecture allows to extend the functionality of the application in any way: adding a new audio input/output format, a new DSP filter or even a new GUI. fmedia is very small and fast: it has low CPU & memory consumption making it ideal to listen to music or process audio files while running on a notebook's battery.
Features
  • fmedia can decode: .mp3, .ogg (Vorbis), .opus, .m4a/.mp4 (AAC, ALAC, MPEG), .mka/.mkv (AAC, ALAC, MPEG, Vorbis), .avi (AAC, MPEG), .flac, .ape, .wv, .wav.
  • fmedia can encode into: .mp3, .ogg, .opus, .m4a (AAC), .flac, .wav.
  • Self-contained. fmedia uses modified versions of 3rd party libraries: libALAC, libfdk-aac, libFLAC, libMAC, libmp3lame, libmpg123, libogg, libopus, libsoxr, libvorbisenc, libvorbis, libwavpack. Everything is inside the package, so no additional dependencies are required to be installed on your system.
  • Portable. No installation, just uncompress the package anywhere you want!
  • Open-source. You can download the sourcecode from here: https://github.com/stsaz/fmedia
  • Other features include: tabbed interface, hot keys, minimize to tray, tray control, recording, media information, Cue sheets support and more.
Links
Website - http://fmedia.firmdev.com/
Project Page - https://github.com/stsaz/fmedia
History - http://fmedia.firmdev.com/CHANGES.txt
Gallery - http://fmedia.firmdev.com/screenshots.html
Audio Formats Comparison - http://fmedia.firmdev.com/audio-formats/
Publisher - https://github.com/stsaz
fmedia at CodecPack - http://codecpack.co/download/fmedia.html

Downloads
Direct Download Link for the current (as of 2016.11.30) fmedia version- 0.20.1 (the link is not permanent).

Images

fmedia - Program Window - Context Menu:

Image

fmedia - Media Info:

Image

fmedia - Tray Control:

Image

fmedia - File:

Image

fmedia - List:

Image

fmedia - Playback:

Image

fmedia - Record:

Image

fmedia - Convert:

Image

Portability
fmedia can be easily made portable and stealth:
By default fmedia GUI saves its state in file "%APPDATA%\fmedia\fmedia.gui.conf". You can change this by setting "portable_conf" to "true" in fmedia.conf. After that, "fmedia.gui.conf" will be stored in program directory (e.g. "C:\Program Files\fmedia\fmedia.gui.conf"), thus making fmedia completely portable.
  • Download the archive.
  • Extract the archive to a folder of your choice.
  • Open fmedia.conf file with a text editor.
  • Navigate to line portable_conf false.
  • Edit it changing false to true:

    Code: Select all

    portable_conf false
    portable_conf true
  • Save changes.
  • Run fmedia-gui.exe.
  • The configuration file (fmedia.gui.conf) will be saved to program folder.
Requirements
Currently fmedia is available for x64-bit systems only.

License
fmedia is open source (the code is available at GitHub). I couldn't find the license type.

Note
fmedia is equipped with detailed help files (help.txt, help-tui.txt, README.txt).
The developer, Simon Zolin is very helpful and open to suggestions.

File Details
Name: fmedia-0.20.1-win-x64.zip
File Size: 3199531 Byte(s) (3.05 MB)
Modified Date: 2016-11-30 15:04
MD5: 1f20e5941687030dffce9b8609929a0f
SHA1: 64610007de036ed704831cf86d4ac7cb403876f5
SHA256: 294f7660247f5165efe1c5779d5a8bbeccf1297aedcb022d8d8391dd0fd6a4bd
CRC32: 63c451a0
VirusTotal analysis - Detection ratio: 0 / 55

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smaragdus
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Re: fmedia 0.22

#2 Post by smaragdus »

fmedia at version 0.22, latest changes:
fmedia v0.21 - Dec 11, 2016

+ GUI: add "To Next Playlist" command into popup menu
- GUI: "instance_mode clear_play" didn't work: playlist wasn't updated properly

- FLAC encode: the last block of data wasn't written (FF v16.08 bug)

* file output: support $year variable (album year)
* file output: $-vars: replace more bad characters; trim trailing whitespace
- queue: fix segfault on "Previous" command if track being played is inside inactive playlist
- fmedia: --track argument didn't work if multiple tracks are specified out of order
fmedia v0.22 - Dec 25, 2016

+ WASAPI: support loopback mode (record from playback)
+ fmedia: add "--dev-loopback" argument
+ core: support reading from stdin (@stdin.EXT) (WAV) (synchronous)
+ core: support writing to stdout (--out=@stdout.EXT) (WAV, FLAC, OGG)
*! fmedia: --outdir argument was removed. Use --out instead.

+ GUI: new command "Filter" to search/filter tracks in playlist
+ GUI: global hotkeys can be assigned to fmedia commands ("global_hotkeys" setting in fmedia.conf)
+ GUI: show icon in tray while recording ("status_tray" config setting)
* GUI: record: support "Stop after" setting
* GUI: record: add "Capture Device Number" setting
* GUI: Open/Add modal dialog doesn't block main thread
- GUI: recording: correctly update GUI if recording was finished with an error

* WAV: support "data" chunk with unknown size
- WavPack: APE tags weren't recognized
- MPEG read: unknown ID3v2 tags were skipped
- MPEG read: segfault on unknown APE tag
- WASAPI playback: the first block of mono audio data was skipped

+ conf: support "include" keyword to include additional configuration files
User settings may be stored in fmedia-user.conf
- conf: when using a setting from user conf file, the module's other settings were reset to default (v0.17 bug)
- net.icy: 2nd opened track didn't work
- net.icy: "--out-copy": didn't recover from errors properly
- queue: meta data from file has higher priority than artist/title from .m3u
- queue: "Next" after "Clear" didn't work

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webfork
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Re: fmedia

#3 Post by webfork »

Thanks for the post. It seems like the selling point of this is being really lightweight. What's RAM usage look like?
Currently fmedia is available for x64-bit systems only.
Darn. This is becomming increasingly common. I specifically setup a 32-bit Win7 environment to maintain compatibility with older applications but that's increasingly cutting off access to new ones.

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smaragdus
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Re: fmedia

#4 Post by smaragdus »

@webfork
I wouldn't call fmedia extremely light-weight- it uses about 36 MB pf RAM on my machine, x64 programs usually use more resources than x32 ones. Although that my system is x64 and that I have enough RAM I sometimes prefer x32 versions (when available), especially for browsers. I am not happy when developers dump x32 systems and remove support for Windows XP.

billon
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Re: fmedia

#5 Post by billon »


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Midas
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Re: fmedia

#6 Post by Midas »

Nice little audio player. Consumes around 20MB memory on my Windows 7.

Sadly, it can't play SomaFM online streams -- apparently, because it fails to correctly identify them by Mime Type...

Code: Select all

Error net.icy: *2:	unsupported Content-Type: audio/x-mpegurl

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webfork
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Re: fmedia

#7 Post by webfork »

Midas wrote: Wed Feb 14, 2018 5:56 amSadly, it can't play SomaFM online streams -- apparently, because it fails to correctly identify them by Mime Type...
The author lists an email you might report that to (stsaz [at] yandex.ru). Given that Soma is a fairly popular net radio station, I expect that would be a common ask.

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Midas
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Re: fmedia

#8 Post by Midas »

Topic update: fmedia v1.16 released 2020-03-11 (changelog and downloads at https://github.com/stsaz/fmedia/releases).

BTW, fmedia homepage is now at https://stsaz.github.io/fmedia/.

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webfork
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Re: fmedia - media player/recorder/converter

#9 Post by webfork »

Update: still in development as of May of this year, now at v.1.31

Homepage is still talking about portability and being self-contained, so that's nice to see.

freakazoid
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Re: fmedia - media player/recorder/converter

#10 Post by freakazoid »

I was just made aware of fmedia through the Tiny Audio Players thread. GUI reminds me of foobar2000. I will give this a try and see if there's room in my lineup for yet another audio player :)

Update: Quick review. Wow, this player doesn't use any CPU whatsoever. Low memory usage. Less than 3MB RAM. Most things are configured in conf files, but plays mostly all the major audio codecs. Currently, fmedia only supports web radio stations with unencrypted HTTP streams, not HTTPS.

Here are some better portable instructions:

1. Create a file called fmedia-ext.conf and enter the following in the file:

core.portable_conf true

2. Save and launch fmedia-gui.exe.

I would recommend using this fmedia-ext.conf file instead of fmedia-user.conf for any of your custom config settings like hotkeys, etc. as fmedia likes to write to fmedia-user.conf when closing and can mess up any custom settings you might have entered there.

I should also point out that the author has a new player in the works called Phiola, which is the successor to fmedia.
is it stealth? ;)

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