April 28, 2004

Music Player Interfaces

So, prompted by the new iTunes release, I thought I’d set down some thoughts on music players, and how they all suck, at least a little bit.

Firstly, here’s what I require from a music player:

  • play stuff (in mp3 and ogg format) randomly from entire collection
  • allow easy browsing and queuing of albums and individual songs, but just keep stuff playing randomly if I don’t select anything.
  • customizable keyboard shortcuts for common functions (play/pause, next song, etc.)

Here’s what I’d like to have in a music player:

  • display cover art
  • handle custom genres in id3 tags properly
  • audioscrobbler support
  • ability to access current song programmatically
  • automatically refresh music database
  • don’t make me install a database

What I don’t really need that seem like must-haves for other people:

  • song rating
  • fancy playlist generation
  • visualizations

Now, I’ve tried about every (free) player available on Windows and Linux, and they all fall down in some fashion (usually queuing). With iTunes’ new party shuffle, it gets the closest on windows. (It probably also means that rhythmbox will get the functionality soon.) iTunes doesn’t have customizable keyboard shortcuts though, and I haven’t been able to find a plugin that provides it. With a few different plugins winamp has most of the functionality I want, but not nearly as elegantly as iTunes.

On Linux, yammi has the functionality pretty much nailed, but its interface is a little, well, cluttered. It also doesn’t update its database automatically (and when you DO, you also have to save the damn thing). It also uses xmms as a backend, which doesn’t always work smoothly.

The lesson: interfaces are hard, especially when they meet up with widely divergent user needs.

One app that doesn’t meet my needs but is at least not trying to clone iTunes: muine. (Note to developers: the integrated cover art retrieval is cool, but why are you saving it to some crappy db file in my home directory? Save it to the mp3 location!)

Update: iTunes Remote and Hot Keys Plus give me configurable keybindings for iTunes. Shiny.

Posted by Bill Stilwell at April 28, 2004 11:12 PM
Comments

I was going to recommend the very elegant Synergy as a plug-in/add-on for iTunes, but then remembered that you are on Windows. I would assume that someone could do the same thing for Windows, especially with the addition of COM support in iTunes 4.5. Synergy is great on so many levels--being able to use keyboard commands to go forward and backwards in playlist, to pause, skip, and to rate songs, plus the quick or permanent translucent display of the cover art, artist, song, album, and rating (which items display is customizable). It also has other features that I don't use, but others like. You could check to see if they have a Windows version of the project.

Posted by: allgood2 at April 29, 2004 09:01 AM

For some reason your post reminded me of this ;-)
http://www.ok-cancel.com/archives/week_2003_10_10.html

Posted by: Jeff at April 29, 2004 10:45 PM