RSSAOL Fine Tunes New Media Player
By Nate Mook | Published December 9, 2004, 2:51 PM
EXCLUSIVE AOL Music is ramping up its efforts to release a new Media Player independent of the AOL client software, with a long-term goal of building its own music store.
While a beta release is currently only available to AOL members, sources tell BetaNews the company plans to bring AOL Media Player (AMP) outside its "walled garden" to expose new users to AOL content and services.
Commerce integration will play a key role as AOL targets the mainstream Web. Taking a note from iTunes and Windows Media Player, future revisions of AMP are expected to include the ability to buy music from within the player, BetaNews has learned.
Initially, AMP will feature the same digital purchase options as AOL Music: iTunes for individual songs and subscription-based MusicNet. But such integration poses a problem, as music from these stores is proprietary and would require that a user switch to another media player.
Long term, AOL isn't likely to sit idly by as rivals corner the music download market. Sources say the company is considering its options for an in-house music store available to both members and Web consumers. Thus, music purchased from AOL can be played back directly in AMP.
Microsoft followed a similar path on the road to launching its own MSN Music store in September.
The move away from member-only offerings reflects a general strategy shift at AOL into the realm of free Web services. With a declining dial-up subscriber base, the company is spinning off its products to attract fresh consumers.
AMP was previously slated to be a component of AOL's Fanfare suite, which has since been disbanded. As first reported by BetaNews, Fanfare was designed as an alternative AOL client for broadband users and included a Web browser, spyware protection, instant messaging, calendar, and e-mail client.
Although AOL client tie-ins will remain, AMP is now a full-fledged application, complete with media library, video support and CD ripping to MPEG4 AAC or Microsoft's WMA formats. Like iTunes and Winamp 5, AOL's other media player, AMP features customizable smart playlists and integrated streaming audio from Radio@AOL.
Surprisingly, AMP is not based on AOL's Winamp platform, only utilizing Winamp's "Unagi" playback engine. Instead, AMP is built atop the company's Communicator user interface framework. Communicator was first unveiled in beta form two years ago and eventually evolved into Fanfare.
Despite the overlap, AMP is not meant to replace Winamp - even with the recent departure of the player's development team. AOL says its new Media Player is not a competing product and has different audience, as Winamp users are not likely AOL users.
Building AMP from scratch was not an easy task, and AOL has yet to set a final release date. A source close to the company says AMP has been in development for three years, citing "rewrite after rewrite." Beta testing continues, however, with new builds expiring in early 2005.
it's a new Player DivX (integrate the DivX) and listen to radio, download the music, play the clip..... AOL AOL ok but it's not the only player....
http://www.divx.com/software/browse.php?cid=18
http://www.prodiff.com
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|I think this articles makes a big mistake : AOL Communicator was never built atop XUL. It uses wxWindows (http://www.wxwindows.org/ ).
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|Great - QuickTime, Real, Windows Media Player and now another media player we'll all be required to have in order to play that one quirky file.
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|Mm I can imagine a new file format called AMV or AMA coming out soon. (AOL Media Video or AOL Media Audio)
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|So it's built using XUL? The same UI framework used by the Mozilla Foundation for their
products such as Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and the Mozilla App-Suite. Oh, and it's
the UI codebase for Netscape 7 too, since that's built upon the Mozilla App-Suite.
Should be interesting to see if this get's integrated into the upcoming Netscape browser
built upon Firefox that's currently being prototyped to a number of private beta testers.
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|There are alternatives actually. Don't fall victim to a worthless player that tries to bundle spyware with it's product.
Check out, Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative. Both available at Softpedia.com
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|in addition to XUL it seems to be using some type of flash-based interface. it's very quick and nicely laid out, but that's about it.
i doubt AOL is going to push any type of proprietary format because they're not in any position to. instead this is a great and convenient way to listen to AOL Radio (IMO the best sounding radio service online) w/o launching the huge application.
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|Yes, XUL's the language that Mozilla uses, and Netscape Communicator, as a Mozilla derivative also uses it. However, XUL was proven too slow and annoying to handle the function of an entire webbrowser suite (the Gecko engine had to parse both webpages and the interface...)
Firefox is faster than Mozilla Suite because it has user interfaces optimized for each OS it runs on. Thunderbird is the same way. XUL was origionally picked for Mozilla because it's OS independent, but that also means it has to recreate many functions that are built into different OS's..)
That said, I don't think it will be in future versions of Netscape, if there are any after the upcomming fugly Firefox-based beta browser they have. Firefox, while probably capable of rendering XUL, is not XUL based.
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|If you visit the URL chrome://browser/content/browser.xul in Firefox, you will see that the UI is still XUL. XUL was never the problem with the mozilla suite, but it was rather the integration between all the various functions in the one process.
The only mozilla product that doesn't use XUL for the UI is Camino, which uses native Mac OS X widgets. This product is obviously not cross platform as a result.
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|In reply to BobPaul, who wrote:
"Firefox, while probably capable of rendering XUL, is not XUL based."
Wrong. Like the Mozilla App-Suite and Netscape 7.x, Firefox uses a XUL based UI.
Meanwhile, Netscape Communicator (aka Netscape 4.x) never used XUL in it's UI.
That always used native UI widgets relating to whatever OS it was installed upon.
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|There already is. It's called NSV (Nullsoft Video) and Shoutcast. Remember, AOL owns Nullsoft and has made lucrative use of many of the technologies that came from that shop.
Additionally, much of the streaming video you see inside of the AOL client that is not RealVideo is actually NSV. :)
From Cnet.com (June 2nd, 2003):
"Code-named Llama, AOL's media player is based on code from its Nullsoft subsidiary, which produces the Web-based Winamp media player, the sources said. The AOL version will use Winamp's 2.x software, an earlier version of its current 3.x product.
Also new on Llama will be support for Nullsoft's streaming audio and video formats, called NSA and NSV, respectively. AOL plans to use Nullsoft formats to stream exclusive content produced for AOL 9.0, but it will not force third-party providers with their own Web sites to support the format. Nullsoft formats are currently being used in AOL's narrowband and broadband radio services."
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