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aylet plays music files in the `.ay' format. These files are essentially wrappers around bits of Z80 code which play music on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128's sound hardware - either the beeper, or (eponymously) the AY-3-8912 sound chip. (Files using the Amstrad CPC ports are also supported.) The sound hardware emulation is based on the one I wrote for the Spectrum emulator Fuse, and the Z80 emulation is from Ian Collier's `xz80'.
There are front-ends for curses and X, both with much the same features. That said, the curses version does have a `non-UI' option, letting you use it in much the same way as mpg123. You can also output music as a sample on stdout.
Note that playlist management is rather poor at the moment (it just plays files specified on the command-line). I do plan to fix this eventually.
The current version is 0.5, available from ibiblio.
This excerpt from NEWS lists the changes from aylet 0.1 onwards.
Fixed a stupid bug where the fadeout time defaulted to zero, so by default all tracks lasting longer than 3 minutes were cut off abruptly.
Added 16-bit support. Now defaults to this when possible. New option `-e' forces 8-bit playback (even that is improved, due to the 16-bit mixing now done). Thanks to Stuart Brady for inspiring this change.
Added `-t' option, to play only a given track (actually slightly different, see the man page). Thanks to Bartlomiej Ochman for this.
Fixed unhelpful interactive stop-after-setting behaviour when started with stop-after set to something not a multiple of 30 seconds; now the first interactive change will set it to the nearest multiple in the specified direction. Thanks to Bartlomiej Ochman for this too.
Fixed a compilation error with newer versions of gcc (the code was wrong before, but wasn't complained about). Thanks to Daniel Baumann for pointing this one out.
Finally uses accurate AY levels. Thanks to Matthew Westcott for the measurements these were based on.
Removed beeper fading, which wasn't actually necessary and was causing problems with some tracks, most noticeably in Trantor. The rest position is still central for AY-only and CPC tracks, though, so the change shouldn't affect those.
Added partial port-bitmask to allow for certain less-than-ideal .ay conversions. Thanks to Vít Hotárek for helping find this one.
Fixed silly typo which meant that L and L' weren't set correctly when starting up the Z80. (Though curiously, this bug didn't seem to break any .ay files.) Thanks to Patrik Rak for spotting this.
Previously, when a track stopped and happened to do so leaving high/low level `silence' (e.g. a few AY tracks and, given the beeper-fade removal, all beeper tracks), if this change happened during a fade the fading level would screw up the silence detection and give (with default settings) up to ten seconds of extra `silence'. Now fixed.
In xaylet, long file details (e.g. track name) no longer expand the window to fit, but are clipped. You can still manually resize the window to see the rest of the text, if you like.
OUT instructions previously took too long, making some beeper tunes (e.g. Heavy on the Magick) sound terribly slow - fixed.
New AY volume levels, which should more closely reflect actual AY output.
Added support for CPC files.
A native sound driver for OpenBSD. Thanks to Chris Cox for this.
Fixed most clicking problems. There are still a few, but it's doing much better than before.
Rewrote envelope emulation, the old one couldn't be made to cope with high-speed envelopes (as used in some demos). Also fixes presumably-accidental zero-period envelope use with `negative' volume (e.g. Afterburner).
Fixed high-frequency noise.
Beeper tones inverted, so they're now the right way up. :-)
Changed field label from "Title" to "Misc" throughout. Some files use it for Title, some Copyright, some both. So "Misc" is about the only reasonable label.