Motivation for Komorebi

The first version of Komorebi was written in 1996 Q1, back when it was called ActionPlayer. Komorebi was born out of frustration with existing media "jukebox" players at that time. Back then, NO existing multimedia jukeboxes support LFN. Some claim they're designed for Win95, yet do not support even the most basic Win95 features such as LFN. Thus my filenames inevitably get chewed up. I wrote Komorebi mainly to solve that problem.

I also wanted the jukebox to present to me a better-looking name than "c:\sound\myfile.wav". The latest mechanism to enable this is through either a mapping dictionary or a INFO chunk.

For example, with the dictionary you can map "myfile.wav" to a friendlier "My File" for display. CJK character sets are supported for both filename and friendly name.

Info chunks are extra information fields defined by Microsoft and Intel for the RIFF file format, so this is a standard scheme. WAVE files are RIFF files, so you can use info chunks with them.. The INFO chunk for each WAVE file can be edited with the included RIFFTagger utility. When Komorebi looks for a friendly name, it looks at the file's INFO chunks first, specifically the "Name" chunk. If it sees a valid INFO chunk, then it will be used for display. Otherwise it will look in the dictionary for help.

If neither INFO chunk nor dictionary entry exists for the particular file, Komorebi will simply use the filename for display.

Over the months I have continued to improve this whenever I find the time. Features have been placed in and removed in a quest to find the perfect balance between ease-of-use and bells-n-whistles. I focus mainly on compactness and the ability to play a wide variety of media files. Komorebi is coded with the latest version of MS Visual C++ and MFC. Komorebi is a user-interface and functional evolution to Actionplayer 3.0, and I hope you find the new UI pleasant.