What library to use for a java based media player?

Question

I'm working on developing a media player like application in Java (it's a swing based application) and I want it to be able to run on smoothly using as many different file formats as possible. I want to be able to take in a bunch of music files, then retrieve their tag information (artist/album/songname/etc), and then later play them. I've done a bit of poking around but it's hard to find a library which will support .m4a, .mp3. and maybe even .flac files. Does anyone know of a library which will do what I want? Thanks!

Answer 1

JMF is, to put it in the nicest possible way, rather out of date, unmaintained, difficult to distribute and in my experience has quite a few annoying bugs that crop up where you least expect them. And if you can get FMJ to work at all, good luck - they pride on it being an up to date, drop in replacement but my experience begs to differ on both those points.

Personally I wouldn't even consider it - just use separate libraries for each format or bunch of formats you want to support. JLayer would be a good one to start with as it can do a fair few, JFlac will do your flac files on top of that.