Whamb is a reader digital audio for Mac OS X. It supports audio CD, the files MP3 and Ogg Vorbis as well as streams (“flow”) Internet.

Whamb is the first to draw part of technology Hello from Apple (implementation of the standard Zeroconf) to make it possible to divide your playlists and pieces on your lan without any configuration.

The idea first of Whamb was to propose a light and fast reader MP3/OGG, only for Mac OS X. After the loss of some readers turning under Mac OS 9.x, the user, did not have much choice while passing on Mac OS X. Whamb is not carried of Classic/OS 9, but is built and thought for Mac OS X, moreover it cannot turn under Classic. Whamb draws part of new technologies from Mac OS X like CoreAudio, CoreGraphics (“Quartz”), the threads (light processes) native Mach, and of some optimizations for G4 (Altivec).

However, the last version of this program (1.2) date of May 2003 and nothing seem to indicate the nearest exit of a new grinding. He is regarded as unstable under any later system with OS 10.2.

Characteristics

Whamb is of a perfect ease of use: it can as easily manage playlists as files on Finder, and can even keep your files synchronized with Finder (indeed, if you add or withdraw audio files using Finder, the playlists of Whamb will be automatically updated), it is a new characteristic.

Whamb directly uses CoreAudio to play the pieces, one of the best new technologies added to Mac OS X. Note than usually, this technology is only used in the professional audio software.

The window of the Whamb reader is entirely personnalisable on the level of appearance (one says “skinnable”), and several skins (or topics) is provided by defect with the software. Others skins are or will be available on this same Web site. Also, Whamb uses “Quartz” (code name for CoreGraphics), a new technology of Mac OS X, to generate and manage graphics, and uses the events Carbon, very powerful because low level, to manage the interaction with the user.

Despite everything these characteristics, an audio reader (who often turns in background) should not take much resources/time processor. The decoding of the audio is optimized for the processors PowerPC and uses some Altivec optimizations on PowerPC G4.

If you use Whamb on Mac which charges much (“load” raised, i.e. it does many things simultaneously), with the assistance of powerful the threads Mach of Darwin (the part UNIX of Mac OS X), the reader can, in option, to decode in real-time, which enables him to discharge from the time constraints and thus nothing will be able to disturb it and cross or make jump the music.

Bond

• Whamb