Archive:PAPlayer

Paplayer or PAP for short, you may have wondered what it is? Then this document is for you.

It stands for Psycho-acoustic Audio Player. PAP began as a pure mp3player using Winamp's in_mp3.dll for decoding (around 12th of April 2005), but only a few weeks later has evolved into a multicodec musicplayer. When this page was last updated (Mar 13th 2006) it has the following features:

Currently Supported Codecs

(.dll's must be placed under the [XBMCFOLDER]/system/players/paplayer subfolder for the listed music format to become active)

• MP3 MPEG-1 Audio Layer3 (needs MADCodec.dll from SVN) Based on libmad
• MP2 MPEG-1 Audio Layer2 (needs MADCodec.dll from SVN) Based on libmad
• OGG VORBIS (needs vorbisfile.dll from SVN) Based on vorbis
• MPC aka Musepack aka Mpeg+ (needs libmpcdec.dll from SVN) Based on libmpcdec 1.2.2
• AAC aka LC-AAC and also AAC+ aka HE-AAC (needs AACCodec.dll from SVN) Based on faac (see i. below)
• ALAC aka Apple Lossless (needs AACCodec.dll from SVN) Based on alac
• APE aka Monkey's Audio (needs MACDll.dll from SVN) Based on MAC (see ii. below)
• FLAC aka Free Lossless Audio Codec (needs libFLAC.dll from SVN) Based on LibFlac
• WavPack (needs wavpack.dll from SVN) Based on wavpack
• SHN aka 'shorten' (needs libshnplay.dll from SVN) Thanks to Holger Stenger for the dll!
• WAV or WAVE, short for WAVEform audio format (builtin)
• XBADPCM XBOX ADPCM game audio (ADPCM.dll)
• AIFF short for Audio Interchange File Format (builtin)
• DTS-WAV (needs DCACodec.dll from SVN) Based on libdca (see iii. below)
• AC3-WAV (needs AC3Codec.dll from SVN) Based on liba52
• DTS-CDDA (needs DCACodec.dll from SVN) Based on libdca (see iii. below)
• AC3-CDDA (needs AC3Codec.dll from SVN) Based on liba52
• CDDA aka Audio CD playback, Red Book standard (builtin) Based on libcdio
• WMA Windows Media Audio (builtin)

Currently supported players

• IT short for Impulse Tracker (needs dumb.dll from SVN) Based on D.U.M.B 0.93
• S3M short for Scream Tracker 3 (needs dumb.dll from SVN) Based on D.U.M.B 0.93
• MOD short for Amiga Module (needs dumb.dll from SVN) Based on D.U.M.B 0.93
• XM Fast Tracker 2 (needs dumb.dll from SVN) Based on D.U.M.B 0.93
• NSF NES Sound Format (needs NoseFart.dll from SVN) Based on Nosefart
• SPC SPC700 sound file (needs snesapu.dll from SVN) Based on alpha-ii's snes APU
• GYM Genesis music file (needs gensapu.dll from SVN) Based on gens apu
• SID Commodore 64 Music (needs libsidplay2.dll from SVN) Based on libsidplay2+resid
• Adlib OPL2/3 FM Music (needs adplug.dll from SVN) Based on adplug (see iv. below)
• YM ATARI ST music (needs stsoundlibrary.dll from SVN) Based on st sound
• ADX/AST/ADP/DSP/YMF/HPS Gamecube ADPCM compressed music (needs cube.dll from SVN) Based on in_cube
  (NOT related to XBOX or PS2 ADPCM)

Currently supported tagstandards

• APEv1
• APEv2
• ID3v2
• ID3v1
• ID666
• Vorbis Comments (used by Ogg & Flac)

Other PAP features worth mentioning are

• SSRC resampling from 44.1kHz to 48kHz (Xbox hardware can only process 48kHz audio)
• Gapless support (means if audio is ripped in a certain way, it will playback without gaps)
• Crossfade tracks (adjustable 1–10 seconds)
• ReplayGain support
• Cuesheet support (.cue files) for any supported codec.
• Ogg Chapter support

Supported protocols smb:// (Samba) xbms:// (CCX) cdda:// (AudioCD) iso9660:// udf:// lastfm:// (Last.FM Radio) shout:// (Shoutcast) Local (Harddisk)

Unsupported Protocols (handled by mplayer) daap:// (iTunes) http://

Some general info about PAP

When any or all of above codecs are not installed in its proper place, Mplayer will handle playback instead (if Mplayer supports the format). Mplayer is not built for pure audioplayback and you will loose many advantages (features) that PAP has.

Known Issues

i. There's alot of confusion regarding the MP4/M4A file extensions. Rename .mp4 to .m4a if you want PAP to be able to play it, otherwise Mplayer will handle playback. Also worth mentioning, PAP does NOT support DRM'd (iTunes store) music files (.m4p). Plain .aac files works without issues.
ii. The APE decoder does not like files with the highest compression, they will play, but it can take quite a while to start them, which results that they are no longer gapless.
iii. DTS-CDDA & DTS-WAV will never be outputted as DTS, since it must be resampled to 48kHz.
iv. Since there's so many different extensions used, you need to add .adplug to the end of the filename to ease identification for our player.

Troubleshooting

If you find that a codec previously unsupported (by Mplayer) still does not play (or even show up in filelist), and you checked that you have the appropiate codec in [XBMCFOLDER]/system/players/paplayer, chances are good that you attempted to cheat, and did not update (add new .extension) to advancedsettings.xml's <musicextensions>.