Since Zettai-Freeware has been around for quite sometime, we have finally decided to release our own media player software under the Zettai Media Player (ZMP) branding. Although we are aware that we have yet to have strong enough presence in the media player branding, we hope that with the release of our own media player, it will become a catalyst to make our presence even stronger in the near future. Don't worry, it won't be yet another plain media player as you could find in sourceforge.net because we are monitoring the development very closely.
While we have absolutely no programming and other technical skills required to develop a software by our own, we've made sure to find a group of developer based in India and Singapore who will develop the media player exactly as requested by us. We may lack the experience but we know exactly what a decent media player software should offer. All of the coding are being done by the developer but the interface/skin is being designed by us (yes, it will have skinning feature). We also have the final say in the functions and features that will be offered by the player, as well as testing the software for any bugs and programming flaws before we could release it to the public. We also made sure to incorporate state of the art technologies in the player so that the sound quality should be excellent.
For now we decided not to disclose any images/snapshots from the early stage of the software development but you can expect a simple, yet good looking piece of media player software. If iTunes is the software version of iPod, then think of our player as something better than that. It will support all major audio and video formats out of the box (with optional need for external CODECs) as well as Winamp plugins. API and software documentation also will be made available to 3rd-party plugin developers prior to the first public release of the player for them to develop ZMP-specific plugins. CD-ripping and burning will be available too. Other noticeable features would be out of the box support for some less popular media formats, a media management library and a fully customizable equalizer (user-customizable up to 100-band frequency settings, ranging from 20Hz to 20kHz, adjustable up to +/- 20db).
Into sound enhancement department, other than the aforementioned equalizer, the player will also feature various other controls out of the box like replay-gain/normalizer, sound compressor, noise reduction, echo, reverb, 3D depth, flange, stereo widening, virtual surround emulation, individual multichannel volume control, built-in Dolby digital sound decoder, resampler, 'crystalizer' (to restore lost fidelity of of the lossy audio formats) and many more. We know most people would need all of these features because we know different orchestras will sound differently under the different conductors.
So how much is the price for all these? It is 'zettai' (absolutely) free, as in free beer and free as in free speech. We will charge nothing for it and we are pleased that the developer are agreed to make available the source code for free as well, under GPL-like/compatible licensing, but for now (in the mid-development phase) it will remain closed source at least until the alpha version makes its first public appearance. To be honest, we have rejected one application from a Taiwan-based software developer mainly because they refused to make the source code open, so we are glad that our current developer team now shares the same vision with us. Anyways, stay tuned for more details as we develop this software further. Having reviewed quite a number of media players all this time, it's quite nice to finally be able to decide how a media player software should be from the scratch. Hopefully audiophiles alike will love our first ever product once it is out soon.
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