Unify turns 18 this year (Well, 25 if you count it’s C++ parent)

When I first started ripping my CDs and DVDs onto the computer I released quickly I would need something to keep them organised. There was nothing that really suited what I wanted, so in 1996 I started writingMP3Manager in C++.

When in 2002 when I started learning C#, I decided to make a new App called Unify, this would be my learning ground for C# as well as become my go-to app for all things media.

18 years later, this app has grown to 100k+ lines of code and has many different unique (some useful, some cool but never really used and some completely useless but fun!)

  • Multi User, with concurrent user access
  • Explorer Style UI optimisedfor media (Categories, Directories)
  • BNF based language for searching
  • VLC and Winamp integration
  • Media thumbnail cache for quick previews
  • IMDB info retrieval
  • Multiple drives storage redundancy with Backup and self healing maintenance
  • Hierarchicalvideo segment classification
  • Auto content classificationand assisted renaming function
  • Duplicate detection – CRC, content comparison etc
  • Minimal Waste Genetic Algorithmbased DVD maker (showing it’s age there!)
  • and on and on the feature list goes!

This project stated by reusable library set which has evolved over the last 18 years to include things like: DirectX C# audio and video libs, low level libs (CSV, CRC, DirectShow, Hardware interfacing, remote App control, IO abstraction, GUI Abstractions, Transactional Filesystem Lib, Scrappers, IMDB interfaces, custom photo format readers etc)

Roon Remote Display

Roon is Media play and music server which allows extensions to be written for it. I wanted to have a box in the lounge which would display what is currently playing. This feature set quickly grew into also wanting to show song position, album art, slide show, MIDI file decoding and polyphony reducation for alarm sounds etc. More details Here