Hi i'm Miłosz Derezynski.

As i don't have a Facebook account or MySpace or anything, i'll just nail down in words here a little about me (this page is likely to change as it's brand-new for now):

- I'm 29 years old - I live in Berlin/Germany - I'm coding since I was 7 years old or so (BASIC on the ZX81, then assembler on a C64, etc..) - I've almost finished my CS studies at the FHTW in Berlin (i'm a late-starter, which explains the age/study time correlation, for those who wonder)

I'm active within the Gtk+ coding world (not so much GNOME, GNOME libs still scare me!) since around 2001, and in 2003 i've ported XMMS to Gtk+2, which then became to be known as Beep Media Player (the Media Player suffix was chosen as not to be confused with the console tool 'beep'.)

MPRIS

The teams of BMP and VLC have drafted a common media player remote interfacing spec known as MPRIS (Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification).

The system works over D-Bus. The aim is to provide a standard remote interfacing specification which clients like control widgets for the GNOME panel, or whatever you want (imagine the volume turning down or the player pausing when you get an incoming call on Skype), can use.

The principle is simple: Players acquire a bus name in the namespace of 'org.mpris.*' (e.g. org.mpris.vlc for VLC), and an interface name of org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer, with several objects exposed. They can provide own, custom objects for custom methods, but the MPRIS-specced objects conform to the one spec, and thus clients can rely on identical behaviour from each media player.

We have a lib, too! It's an abstraction and implementation of the MPRIS protocol, mainly for clients to use (but in future also for 'servers', which means that media players can very quickly implement MPRIS using the library)

BMP

As my current project, I am working with a few other guys on BMP, a media player which aims at extreme ease of use rather than features. The prototype for BMP was AEON, which was a research project (of mine, not the company's) at my former employer.

Right now, BMP exists in it's 2nd incarnation (and shares no code with XMMS anymore), and supports in the current SVN version, soon to be released as 0.40: Last.fm radio (using the new XSPF-based streaming protocol), Audioscrobbler submissions, a Shoutcast and Icecast lister, Podcasts (including video podcast support), Jamendo, and, finally, also Audio CD playback and ripping.

Usability

This entire ultra mega user experience is spiced up by an extremely easy to use user interface. You really have to search (and you won't find) a button or other control in BMP which, when you activate it, something 'bad' happens (some irreversible configuration change, something regarding the playback right now you didn't want). It sounds trivial, but give it a try to get what i mean.

Musicbrainz

Furthermore, we fully support Musicbrainz. And i mean fully. For example, compilation albums in BMP are grouped automatically when tracks have the same Musicbrainz Album ID (there is no need for artificial flags like "Flag this album as a compilation"). The library aims at full transparency, that means, you load tracks into it, modify in whatever way, delete the library, re-add the music, and you are in the exact same state (an artifical flag like many other apps have of 'group this', is simply lost).

SessionPresence

As of current SVN, i've added support for SessionPresence, and it will be included in the final 0.40 release.