Is "Niep" a word?
Niep (pronounced "neep") is the name of a small town located about 80km (50 miles) from Dusseldorf, Germany, the city in which I spent a large portion of my youth and have fond memories of. To the best of my knowledge, Niep consists of two barns and a 8 hole golf course. I saw a sign that read "Wilkommen in Niep" (Welcome to Niep) when my father took me to the golf course there, and for some reason, found it so amusing that I promised myself I'd name my next programming project "Niep."
A Google search of "Niep," however, will return 2050 results; Niep! is the sixth item listed.

Why another MP3 player?
Considering how there's iTunes and a bunch of other MP3 players, why bother writing another MP3 player? Well, Niep was written before iTunes came out, and when the first beta version was released in Japan in May '00, it was probably the best free MP3 player for the Mac. I eventually abandonned development (mostly out of apathy) but picked it up again when MacOS X came out, and I got the brilliant idea of carbonizing it.
Niep does have unique features that set it apart from most of the other MP3 players. The ability to play movies, is one obvious one, but there are many more as you will see.

Niep is....weird.
Yes, it is. I broke a lot of Mac development conventions, which may make it "feel" a little differently. It, needless to say, looks different too. This deviation allowed me to implement features like skins, window shading, not-so-slow window resizing, etc. There is room for improvement, but I'm also the twisted kind of guy who happens to appreciate the fact that I rolled together my own HI code instead of using Apple's APIs...

Is Niep free?
I'm not sure. Being a poor student, I could sure use a little extra cash, and I'd say I deserve something after spending literally hundreds of hours writing Niep. But, I want people to use Niep more than I want money, and if charging a shareware fee's going to prevent people from using it, then it's not worth it.

Will it be Open Sourced?
Possibly. If I do go the shareware route, I may ope the source to registered users, but it won't be Open Source (there is a difference). At the same time, going Open Source also makes a lot of sense, if I'm going for market domination. If you have an opinion on this, let me know!

I just saw a fish float across my Niep window
You must be seeing things. Niep is a MP3/multimedia player, not a fish tank. In fact, Niep doesn't even use Aqua (sorry, couldn't resist).

Why won't Niep run in Classic (MacOS 9)?
The first few Preview Releases (<2.4) released in Japan did run in MacOS 8.6-9, but not PR3 and above. One reason was that I used Project Builder to Carbonize it, and PB can only build Mach-O apps which run only in MacOS X. Secondly, QuickTime in pre-OS X systems does not provide adequate performance for playing MP3s, and I did/do not want my software to be released if it doesn't have decent quality.

Will there ever be a classic version?
No. Use iTunes. It's a great product...which leads to:

What's Niep's relationship to iTunes?
They're not blood relatives, if that's what you mean. No, they're not dating either. I like to think of them as friends. iTunes is great for ripping, mixing and burning, but I don't think it's all that of a great player. Personally, I use iTunes to encode MP3s and edit ID3 tags, then drag and drop them to Niep. I like iTunes' "Library" function and I'm considering adding a similar feature to Niep.

Some people say that having the playlist and player in one window is "backwards"...
I'm not some people. I've used MP3 players that have playlists and players in different windows, and I thought it didn't make any sense. You can burn me at the stake, I won't split them to two windows. Having said that, iTunes does a terrible job at putting them in the same window too. Personally, I think Niep does a relatively elegant job at it, but well, that just might be me.

How about visual effects?
I could add something, but what are you going to do? Sit there and watch some funky colors dancing on the screen? That's sad. Go outside and play.

Goal
One of my biggest motivations in continuing development of Niep is to make it so good that a lot of people will use it, and that someday I would randomly bump into a Niep user.
On a larger scope of things, I just want to become a better programmer. I never bothered learning C (I knew Pascal though) before I jumped right into Niep which is the best way to learn any programming language.
On an even larger scope of things, I think I'd like to teach when I'm done with this college thing. I'll never become an insanely great programmer, but I think I can help someone else become one.
On a much much larger scope of things... well, let's not get into that. I'll just say forty-two.