The problem with music players
There are a heap of awesome music players out there, for any platforms, for most situations etc, but they all lack one feature, the one I want.
The problem originates in a somewhat deeper problem than just, which is the best music player, namely portability. I have a quite large music collection stored on a file server at home. This server has no graphical user interface, and more important, no multimedia abilities. I also have a small collection of music, which resembles my current favourites, on my laptop. Furthermore I use Last.fm and their subscriber services quite. The Last.fm service creates a so called "music profile" based on what your music player reports to their sites. From this you get "music neighbours", recommendations etc. and the ability to create "tags" for your music. From these you can listen to radio stations.
The home collection is used a an NFS drive, and is only available for me while at home. The music on my laptop is always a subset of that music collection. The Last.fm service includes more than, but not the complete, the large music collection. Earlier I used to have the whole collection organised in a library by Rhythmbox. I also had the laptop subset organised in a library by Quod Libet. The Last.fm radio services is played using either the QT based player provided by Last.fm or Last Exit, which is more Gnome-friendly.
The problem is tht if I would start Rhythmbox without the NFS volume mounted, Rhythmbox would assume that the library is gone and that all song should be removed from the database, which is in a sense correct. I addition, the small collection on the laptop usually change and Quod Libet has no way of keeping track of these changes. Due to this I usually end up switching between Rhythmbox, Quod Libet, Beep media player (which is an XMMS clone), Last Exit and Last.fm Player. Beep is usually used since it’s a playlist based media player which does not create any databases. In addition, Rhythmbox cannot play single files without adding them to the library.
So, what do I want? I want a music player which can be given a single file, or a singe playlist and play these songs, no more. It should also be able to keep track of a library, but show this as unavailable when the network volume is not mounted. Finally, I would love to see a Last.fm interface integrated into this. If single files are played they should not be added to the library. The library however should observer it’s content, and if any files are added to the path they should show up in the library. The Last.fm interface should report any song played, as most players can with a plugin, but should also be able to use the Last.fm radio services.
April 22nd, 2006 at 14:07
Well let’s make a music player to your liking ;-)
April 24th, 2006 at 10:03
As far as I know, amarok kan handle all this… maybe not the interface you’re after but it can get quite small too. Maybe worth a try.
May 10th, 2006 at 09:09
Why not a musicdaemon on your server and then stream the music? Maybe have a little backup on the laptop for places without networkconnection but.
Hum, I guess the Last.fm radio thing would be hard but for examples mpd can report to last.fm what you play.
May 10th, 2006 at 21:42
I use music player daemon for now, but it does not support Last.fm radio. Maybee I should fix that :)
May 11th, 2006 at 18:47
Ofcours you should :) (typing on my new kinesis keyboard ;))
August 31st, 2006 at 23:16
Stop complicating the situation. Just use your webserver to serve the tunes and use XMMS. Making playlists is easy, security is easy. XMMS can handle SSL. Your playlists are just lists of urls.