What's a good low-demand, command-line MP3 player?

[JCKnife]

I'm running Mamewah with several different emulators.

There are a few games that I'd like to run my own soundtrack in the background while playing.

What's a good command-line MP3 player that will take up minimum resources while playing in the background?

[joe jet]

I believe that mamewah itself can do this.   I guess if you only want to play the soundtrack in certain games you would need to create a separate "emulator" (mame2?) if you did not want the music in all mame games.  Mamewah setup that i use has a check mark for each emulator to play music during play.

[JCKnife]

Really? I knew it could play music in the FE menu but not during the game. I'll look into it. I believe I'm on ver. 1.61

[Howard_Casto]

I'm running Mamewah with several different emulators.

There are a few games that I'd like to run my own soundtrack in the background while playing.

What's a good command-line MP3 player that will take up minimum resources while playing in the background?

Resources (memory and processor wise) isn't the issue that causes bad performance when playing a mp3 and a game at the same time.  The limitations of most sound cards are.  You only have a limited number of channels when playing back audio.  Every time you add another channel, the audio quality of all channels is degraded to compensate for the loss of throughput.  A more important issue is that sound soruces produced from multiple applications "confuse" the mixer.  You'll notice the volume of one of the sources dramatically drop while the other is playing.  To adjust that source often makes the already loud source rise as well.  


Long story short, in general, this is a bad idea all around.  Avoid doing such things.  

[JCKnife]

I tried it last night, running Windows Media Player (Chemical Brothers) underneath ePSXe playing Tempest X. Music sounded great, game sounded great, no volume issues...

So I'm still looking for a command-line MP3 player. Google has turned up a couple but they're not working for me.

[csa3d]

I'm searching for something similar.  I'd like a way to play MP3's behind a game, and have control over the volume of the Mame game playing and the MP3 player, essentially allowing Mame volume to slide down while MP3 volume slides up.  That way I can still hear the game softly for audio clues while jaming out to the the current track.  Idealy, this software could be tied to command or hotkeys.

Please post any additional findings.

-csa

[Silver]

Its been a while since I've used it (it may have been updated) but foobar2000 is a great VERY low resource mp3 (and other) player.

It also has command line support:

foobar2000 /?     - for a list of available commands

Or run foobar2000 and go to Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts for a list of command line commands.

Foobar2000: http://www.foobar2000.org/


eg:

foobar2000.exe /play "Tuuuune!.mp3"

and

foobar2000.exe /stop

[elvis]

mpg123 is a command-line audio player and mp3 player/decoder for POSIX systems.  I do recall someone making a Win32 port for it at some stage.  There are links to win32 patches from their main site, but no precompiled binaries.

http://www.mpg123.de/

If you know how to use MinGW, GNU Make and GCC it would be fairly trivial to knock up a binary.

[screaming]

Winamp with the Reproduction Control should be able to do what you need on Windows.

Keep in mind though that MP3 decoding is not a cheap process and could very easily interfere with MAME and your game play.  If you definitely want the background music I'd recommend converting it to a WAV file first (which Winamp can do). 

Disk is cheaper than CPU...