FastPlay

A fast, accessible audio player for Windows and macOS with support for tempo/pitch shifting, effects, and screen reader accessibility.

Features

• Tempo, pitch, and rate adjustment (Speedy for speech, Signalsmith Stretch for music)
• Audio effects (reverb, echo, EQ, compressor, stereo width, center/vocal cancel, convolution, 3D audio)
• Recording to WAV, MP3, OGG and FLAC
• MIDI with SoundFonts, and tracker modules
• Internet radio streaming with favorites
• YouTube audio playback
• Screen reader support via Universal Speech
• Hotkey support
• Chapter navigation for audiobooks

Prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2022 (or its Build Tools) with the "Desktop development with C++" workload
  • Download from Visual Studio Downloads
• CMake 3.21 or newer
• Git (CMake fetches some dependencies with it)

Dependencies

Run download-deps.bat once. It downloads SQLite, Speedy, Sonic, KissFFT, Signalsmith Stretch and FDK AAC into deps/ and src/, and FastPlay's FFmpeg into ffmpeg/: the audio-only build CI makes with ci/ffmpeg/build.sh, taken from CI's latest run with the GitHub CLI (gh auth login first).

wxWidgets (the user interface toolkit), UniversalSpeech (screen reader speech), miniaudio, SpessaSynth, libopenmpt, LAME, libogg and libvorbis are fetched and built by CMake itself on the first build.

Building

Open a command prompt and run:

build_new.bat

This configures CMake in build/, builds FastPlay.exe, and packages FastPlay.zip (and FastPlayInstaller.exe when Inno Setup is installed). The first build takes a while because it compiles wxWidgets; later builds reuse it.

Build Options

Disable screen reader support:

build_new.bat no-speech

Running

After building, run FastPlay.exe. The screen reader client DLLs are loaded from the lib/ subfolder.

Project Structure

FastPlay/
├── src/              # Player, effects, database and other core code
│   ├── audio/        # The audio engine: decoders, tempo, output, recording
│   ├── ui/           # The user interface (wxWidgets)
│   ├── platform/     # Operating system specific code
│   ├── reverb/       # The reverb engines
│   └── spatial/      # The HRTF behind 3D Audio (SADIE II data, pffft)
├── include/          # Header files
├── lib/              # Screen reader client DLLs
├── ffmpeg/           # FastPlay's FFmpeg build (ci/ffmpeg)
├── deps/             # Third-party dependencies (Speedy, Sonic, Signalsmith Stretch, etc.)
├── res/              # Windows resources
├── CMakeLists.txt    # Build definition
├── build_new.bat     # Build script
└── FastPlay.exe      # Output executable

License

This project uses the following third-party libraries:

• FFmpeg (LGPL 2.1 or later), built from source by ci/ffmpeg/build.sh
• miniaudio (public domain / MIT No Attribution)
• SpessaSynth, C port by kode54 (Apache 2.0)
• libopenmpt (BSD)
• LAME (LGPL)
• libogg and libvorbis (BSD)
• Fraunhofer FDK AAC (FDK AAC licence)
• Speedy (Apache 2.0), Sonic (Apache 2.0), Signalsmith Stretch (MIT)
• SQLite (public domain)
• wxWidgets (wxWindows Library Licence)
• Universal Speech (MIT)
• SADIE II HRTF database, University of York (Apache 2.0)
• pffft (FFTPACK licence)