A few month's back i was working with another close programming friend on a media player, we had integrated a great deal of features into a small optimized interface. We wanted to create a player that was both highely flexiable and also the best sounding player around.
Thing's were going well we had WIP (Winamp Input Plugins), Winamp DSP, Winamp Output Plugin support as well as DX/VST plugin host (with chaining) with almost 0 latency on audio playback (ASIO support also). Our VST wrapper was developed from the groundup to be optimized and stable. It supported preset/bank handling, multichannels, non-interface driven plugins as well as paramter automation and (soon) basic midi support.
Infact it was more stable than most wrapper's included in some commercial host's (better than audition's to start with...).
We had put togther some great sounding effects for the player (specifically designed for audio playback). We had even started on our own decoder's for various fileformat's which were aimed at being as optimized as possible and giving the lowest resource usuage. We did some amazing work on OGG and MOD file handling!
We didn't feel including our own effect's was of upmost importance, because VST support meant user could use whatever plugins they liked. Anyway we created some basic limiter/compresser, reverb (awsome sounding), AGC and some filter's...Using any of the many free PEQ we had a beautiful sounding playback engine.
We walked into problem's with creating a stable skin engine and the project was shelfed. It was decided from the start we wanted a true freeform skin system, we had planned on using GDI+ for layered png support and XML as the script format. We walked into issue's mainly with time and trying todo this "right". The sad new's was we had created some great and very stable wrapper's and controls with no home.
I decided that because our player was going to be freeware anyway that we could offer our advice and codebase to another developer who might benefit from our work. Naturally i wanted in exchange the ability to learn and benefit also from this 'deal'. I love learning and imporving apon already good code.
Myself and my team member had both decided that creating a wave editor would be a very intresting project for us both to take part in.
Due to time restrainents with our current employment and myself having contract projects to complete, we made the decision to seek a developer who was not commercially driven or used 'commercial' control's in his project's. A developer who already had a wave editor which was established.
We managed to find a developer who had everything we wanted from a project. My dream is to put togther a good alternative to soundforge, without the 'kludge'. An optimized and stable wave editing enviroment that can be used for mastering and general wave editing task's.
The developer we contacted already had an awsome product (shareware) and had a stable codebase from what we could see on the surface. his program would have been perfect for us to pick up on.
I am very passionate about doing this work, so i decided to email him an early release version of our player and explained the situatation in full what we wanted to improve apon in his application and how we felt we could collab well togther on such a project. I explained to him i wasn't looking for any kind of finicial comeback, just the ability to learn from his work and he would in exchange get full VST/DX support as well as alot of interface and other features that might take a single person a long time to complete.
Trust is the most important aspect of any internet collabiration and in this day and age it can be very hard to gain on the internet.
I contacted this developer about two month's ago with a large in-depth breakdown of our background and what we were intrested in doing for him. To date i have heard nothing back. I am a little upset about this situation, so i decided to do some research for more information on him and try to locate some alternative email addressess. I expected the email might have been deleted (spam filter or something similar...).I managed to find his personal webpage/blog and two more email addressess.
I re-sent the orginal email to him along with some updated information (one time with the attachment the other without) and once again explained the situation.
It's only been a few day's but i still have not recieved anything back, the thing that's getting me is that i can't be 100% sure he is even reading our email's or if their is someone at the other end. I expect he would be intrested in working with us, but i cannot be sure. What would other developer's do? Anytime i've released program's (freeware mainly) i've also accepted other developer's aiding my work.
I did some checking on changelog's and his personal website and nothing has been updated since 2004. I found this strange, because he also hasn't posted on his personal website for month's.
This is a geniue offer as i am really intrested in helping him.
Does anyone have any advice on what's the best option todo now? I consider starting writing our own wave editor, but i don't see the point in doing an entire job like this when their is already an established and great program their by another developer that could benefit from these enhancements.
I guess it's possible he is on holiday or something similar. I will never know and the strange thing is he is still selling his products.
...Confused
..or is that someone else? 
