We've got some good news and bad news lined up for you regarding developer silmarilion and the GameMusicGear homebrew player for the PSP. The good news is that silmarilion passed by the QJ.NET Forums to announce the release of GameMusicGear~MX Release Candidate 1.0 (GMG_MX RC1). This new release introduces the plugin system that silmarilion had discussed before, divided into three types (quoting the readme):

* Input Plugins: For audio decoding (like mp3 plugin, spc plugin, etc)
* Output Plugins: To encode audio to another format (currently wav and mp3 encoders are available)
* Visual Plugins: For music visualization, lyrics display (in the future), etc. Very similar to the winamp plugins.

Aside from the new plugins, GMG_MX RC1 also comes with these functions:

* Skin Support - There are two skins available right now, a new
* simple skin, and the nice old skin made by rockMax.
* Mini Visualizer - There are two mini visualizers available, spectrum
* and wave, inspired by the ones found in winamp.
* Chinnese GBK, BMP and TrueType font support, with LATIN and UTF8 support.
* Zip and Rar files support.
* In game configuration screen.
* Control keys configuration - You can configure it through the
* config menu, or you can do it manually editing the 'keys' file.

As for the band news: silmarilion notes that this release won't have the same compatability range as its previous release, since the dev had to the formats to the new plugin system. This problem is expected to be fixed in the future. GMG MX currently compatible with PSP Fats and Slims running on firmware 3.xx, though a 1.50 kernel version is also under development.

We remind the readers that this version is just a release candidate, and still contains some bugs. Those who wish to report any issues theyexperience will want to infom silmarilion via the QJ.NET PSP Development Forums. Other important details regarding this release are available in the file bundle's readme.