There have been a lot of question asked about the music playback capabilities. I'd like to take this opportunity to tell you a bit about what you can expect.

Yes, it plays music :)

To give you a little background, for a short while I personally was on the fence about what we should provide regarding music playback. There is so much great homebrew out there already which does an excellent job at it. And as fun as it can be, it doesn't often make sense to reinvent the wheel so-to-speak. We also want to support and drive the homebrew community and want to make sure people are exploring all the great stuff that has been created.

On the other hand, we want to ensure that you will be able to take the device out of the box, plug it in, and immediately be able to copy your songs over and play them. It is a benefit for the users who are not quite as familiar with the homebrew scene. We also have this great skinning engine which will lend itself well to the creation of some fantastic media player skins.

To make a long story short (too late), I and the other members of the development team spent a lot of time reading the forum posts and talking to you guys, and it really felt like the consensus was that it would be a good idea to include it as an out-of-the-box feature. So, we did it :)

We didn't want to give you a simple "Ugly-long-list-of-filenames-in-a-single-directory-from-which-you-can-pick-one-and-play-it" type music players. Instead, we scan the filesytem for music files, and automatically organize them into a music library for you, by artist, album, genre etc. From that music library you can either pick an artist, genre, song, album etc. and play it immediately, or you can queue it up into an on-the-fly playlist. We also provide full shuffle and repeat functionality. And of course it's all completely run by our skinning engine. Finally, there's one other super fun feature which I will hold off on discussing, as I'm sure I wouldn't do it justice in words. I believe we should have a video up soon so you can check it out.

I hope I was able to answer your questions adequately.

Peace,
Leto

We would like to inform you that we have shipped a batch of DS-Xtreme carts to various websites around the world for review purposes. This means that within the next few days, you will be able to see what other people think about our device. A list of reviews will be posted in the forum as soon as we are provided with the links by the reviewing sites.

Meanwhile, since we wanted to expand our support to more languages, our french section is now working in collaboration with gx-mod.com to give all our french or quebecois visitors the best possible dedicated support from both DS-Xtreme and gx-mod.com.

If you haven't joined the forums yet, you can find us at http://forums.ds-xtreme.com/

Dino

As Leto had mentioned in our last post, there is one additional feature of the media player which we had not announced. As I'm sure most of you are aware of by now (and many of you had guessed right away!) this is our Dancing LEDs feature, which flashes the 2 DS-Xtreme full color LEDs in unique patterns in time with the music. We've had some great fun playing around with some of the possibilities with our LEDs, and have put together a short video for you here.

We have a few more little surprises planned for you with these LEDs coming up as well, so stay tuned!

--Aphex