History

While hardly anyone had ever heard of mp3 back in early 1997, I began to build up my own mp3 collection. As a Linux (text console) adept, I was heavily frustrated by the lack of a decent mp3 player. There was a (at the time) very popular command-line based mp3 player though, called 'splay'.  I figured I could use its mpeg decoding library and write my own interface in ncurses to control it. The plan was there!

Thinking about how to implement this interface, I also wondered why all mp3players had such plain playlist functionality!  I like the ability to chuck a bunch of CD's in a multi-CD cd player, and then play the CD's in random order. In such a way that the cd player selects one of the five CD's at random, and then plays the entire disc. This continues, until all discs have been played. No mp3 player could do this, so I decided to add it to mine.

The first usable version (0.9.0, named 'mp3player', how's that for originality?) reared its ugly head in august 1997. Since then, lots of things have changed.. You can read the ChangeLog supplied with the source if you are interested in it.