Motivation for ActionPlayer

The first version of ActionPlayer was written in 1996 Q1. ActionPlayer 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 ActionPlayer mainly to solve this 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 a mapping dictionary. For example, you can map "myfile.wav" to a friendlier "My File" for display. CJK character sets are supported for both filename and friendly name.

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. ActionPlayer is coded with the latest version of MS Visual C++ and MFC, so the appearance should look up-to-date.