Over the past few years, I have been slowly but surely building my own music player. It’s been a wild ride. The codebase has radically changed several times, but is always converging on a better music listening experience.
In this article my goal is to take you along for the ride.
I was just recently fighting with loudness and looking for a good player.
Have tried clementine-player, amarok and others and settled around audacious + scripts to apply id3v2 with r128gain, mp3gain, aacgain, vorbisgain and wvgain to try to achieve the best results but the problem with album/playlists seemed unavoidable.
Will, definitively, try to install it on my server.
Good luck!!
I recommend DeaDBeeF.
The problem with music players is that you start with something basic – it just plays the file – which is ok, but you’d like a lot more control, so you add a lot of features.Once there’s nothing more to add, you realize that the software is overcomplicated and a pain to deal with, so you start stripping stuff out. Now you’ve got a much nicer interface, except it no longer does all the things you want it to, so you start adding those features back. Ad nauseam.
You need to try foobar2000.
Seems like modular is the way to go.
I settled on Quod Libet as my player of choice because it manages genre tagging so well. I can add as many genre tags as I like to each track. So ‘Satyagraha’ will appear whether I search for genre=classical, or genre=opera, or genre=minimalist. Allowing genre searches to be general or specific is really useful. In fact you can add any tags you may need such as composer, conductor, orchestra…
Other players may have caught up with this, but when I was trying lots of players, they didn’t.
Of course, if you are even slightly obsessive-compulsive, days can disappear sorting your collection.
I never understood the circle jerk for amarok. I’ve been using rhythmbox and apache for years now, this looks like it might actually fo everything I want for my music collection.
I’m not a music enthusiast, an audiophile or anything like that and as such my needs are simple:
* ReplayGain – support
* Ability to rate my songs and have the player write the rating in the tags inside the file
* Clean UI
* Last.fm – support
* Shuffle
* Using playlists not a hard requirement
That’s it. At the moment I use Winamp, but that’s only because I haven’t found anything better. One thing that annoys me to no end is how every single god damn music player insists on using playlists and keeping the whole library as a separate thing, but what if I never use playlists? What if I just want to play back my whole library?
I don’t play songs per album, I don’t play songs per some common theming, I don’t even play songs per an artist — I just randomly go through the whole library, either through shuffle or just randomly clicking on stuff. I have zero need for playlists.
The problem with Winamp is that if I try to queue a song in library – view it places that in a playlist, but I’m not playing from a playlist, so it never actually works. If I were to just add all my songs in a playlist I would have to manually update it every time I add more music. Also, Winamp’s playlist – view doesn’t allow me to sort songs any way I want nor does it allow me to rate the songs, so I would lose some of the best things about library – view.
^Yep.
I have my entire music collection meticulously organized by name and directory structure. I don’t need or want my music player to sort it for me. Haven’t really found a good one for Linux that doesn’t insist on building a music library.
Good old VLC will let you play directory’s and has a random button.
I just pick the top directory, press random and it will play all day going down through all the sub directory’s.
Though it might be too simplistic for your needs I use MOC myself (http://moc.daper.net/) which lets you play a directory easily and doesn’t build a music library. Optionally you can create playlists easily.
If you haven’t already done so you might want to give foobar2000 a look. Windows media players pretty much suck the devils cojones but Foobar2000 isn’t half-bad.
It’s ridiculously fucking ugly and I didn’t see any way of giving ratings to my songs.
Well, yeah, it’s it pretty but the UI is clean. Forgot you needed the ratings though so bummer about that.
How to do Foobar2000 star ratings:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=59187
After having tried Amarok, Juk, Clementine, I have settled for MOC. It is a terminal-based music-player. I love it.
http://moc.daper.net/
I am working on my own player, mainly because I want my collection to be visible as all files, but also as all artists and cd’s from different devices.
So the ‘playlist’ is only used for speed. Any file added, renamed or deleted is reflected in the next start. You can also do these things from within the application.
Windows version is on hold for the moment, due to a known error, but too little time to post the fix
Please, tell me what you like, dislike or want to be added. Last.Fm support is on the way.
See @ http://www.xixmusicplayer.org
How come that is so important? Where do you get such shitty encodes that you need to volume-correct each song? Kazaa?
Replaygain is awesome and it’s a must-have feature for me. If you have a CD collection spanning many CD’s and many years you’ll notice when you rip it to digital media that they’re all mastered at different volume levels. It’s *really* annoying when you’re listening to one track from, say, early 90’s with the volume cranked up and then the next track comes on and it’s from the loudness-war era and you blow out your eardrums.
Right, but if you’re ripping your own cd collection anyway isn’t it easier to normalise each track to 0db peak right then?
I prefer to keep my ripped media as close to the source as possible. Normalize on rip is as awkward as applying an equalizer when doing the rip, imho.
ReplayGain doesn’t adjust the audio at all, it’s applied during playback and as such you can always go back and remove or adjust the ReplayGain should you have such a need. Normalizing songs while ripping, however, fundamentally adjusts the song itself and to alter it you’d need to go back and re-rip the thing.
Normalize is a big cause of the Loudness Wars.
You’d best leave normalize alone because it alters the original and that’s bad.
Let the player try to normalize upon playback, that’s kinda convenient so you don’t have to ride the volume.
I have been dissatisfied with most music players out there, and I too had been quite curious about MPD. However, the lack of tag editing has been a killer.
The feature that I used in iTunes before I got fed up with lock-in was smart playlists that could use “Is in this other playlist” as a criteria, which allowed me to create an elaborate set of playlists classifying my songs by energy level, instrumentation, tempo, mood, scale, and appropriate setting. From this I could create another playlist to draw on whatever combination of playlist contents I wanted to, arriving at an appropriate playlist at any occasion.
Surprisingly, this flexibility has been missing in Clementine and Amarok, the most powerful conventional music players I’ve seen.
I’m going to be watching libgroove with interest.
I’m using AIMP (www.aimp.ru) for years, as it is like a clean version of Winamp purged of all unnecessary crap that made it into Winamp over the years. It is super fast, has boat load of features, plugin API and support for Winamp plugins. So, imho loudness compensation can very well happen to it.
Seconded. Aimp is a wonderful music player. Never needed anything else.
I never understood the UI of Amarok 2.*, at all. And i used to love 1.* until Clementine came out.
I don’t care about goofy skins, I don’t care about format conversions, I don’t give a flying **** about ‘media library’ crap.
I keep my files in nice neat organized *SHOCK* directories; I go through the directories to put together a playlist for the day… when I double-click on files in the directory I want them to be added to the playlist not played.
END OF STORY.
99% of the crap in ‘modern’ players just pisses me off, gets in the way… and on the whole seems like a major step backwards in functionality. Like iTunes — I can’t fathom how the devil people put up with that useless crippled interface.
Admittedly, I say the same thing about websites and OS UI’s at this point. It all seems crafted to dumb things down to the worst of Internet Explorer 4 Mac so far as UI functionality is concerned… and no, that’s not a compliment.
The ONLY improvement I could see over WinAmp (once you enable ‘enqueue’ instead of ‘play’) would be to actually *SHOCK* use the native UI widgets for winblows (or whatever OS one is using) to even further reduce the overhead and allow it to auto-scale to the system metric — aka the default font size… as a 8514/large fonts/120dpi/20px/win7 medium/whateverTheBlueBlazesThey’reCallingItThisWeek user, that most media players are knee deep in skinning BS with pixel metric fonts pisses me off no end.
But like anything else where you let a PSD jockey piss all over it and then have the giant brass pair to call it “design”, it generally ends up useless to end users no matter how ‘pretty’ it is.
Assuming you read the article, and the wish list associated, there are things that are quite useful:
– Music selection by tags. For example, you have tagged your music with (Rock | Progressive | Heavy Metal | Romantic | Pop | Country | Blue | Jazz | Classic | Trance | Disco …) and you are going to have a party in your house. Fire up your player and select “–music=Disco –year=* –rating=4+ –music=(Trance|Pop) –year=4- –shuffle”. Enjoy your party; 😉 (except for the fact you are going to bear trance)
– Loudness control by playlist, album or selection;
– Control where you are going to have the output, on your phone, home theater / sound system or even tv;
– You are alone on your home, having a relaxing bath with open doors and want to change the music from your phone. 🙂 (if you are luck enough)
I am really going to watch this project very close!!
Edited 2014-04-23 18:46 UTC
Yeah, that’s exactly the type of garbage I could give a flying purple fish about. I don’t have a Klipsch speaker set on my desktop to listen to music off the desktop on some crappy little phone or the tinny speakers in a home theater setup… If I make a playlist it’s because I want to listen to those songs in that order… I don’t find that “tags” are all that useful compared to sorting music by ‘directories’ since that’s just ANOTHER set of data you have to fill out. (and given how buggy/incomplete/inaccurate most music metadata is, *** tags ok?)
… and volume by playlist? What the hell is the point of that?!? I want to change the volume I change the volume… By Playlist? WHA?!?
It’s all goofy extra crap that I have no use or want for — I just want to select my music files from the OS into a playlist, and play them. Why do people want to make it more complex than that?!?
Though to be fair, we are talking about media, where FLAC-tards and their placebo bitrates (when 44khz at 16 bits exceeeds human hearing by 2.5x on both depth and rate) are actually taken seriously.
Edited 2014-04-24 01:57 UTC
You probably don’t care, but since we’re talking about missing or incorrect metadata I’m gonna use this chance to mention MusicBrainz Picard to those people who do care; it is an application that can in most cases create a fingerprint of your music files and find matching information on its databases, including full album-sets and the likes, and works even if the song doesn’t have any metadata in the file at all. It doesn’t work for live-recordings, but for any studio-material should work fine. It can also rename your files and place them in proper Artist/Album/Song – hierachy.
Very handy, very nifty app.
Very handy, very nifty, and with the worst interface I’ve ever seen…
(seriously, for me it was the only GUI app ever for which I had to check the manual before using it)
When you buy an album, a professional one, a kind of normalization is already there (no one likes clipping, or should not). It is not so when you mix things on playlists and, if you have too many of them you would know that, the adjust for one is not necessarily the best for all of them, i.e., loudness compensation can not fulfill “best results” if equally applied to all your music independently of which particular sequence (a playlist) is executed.
I agree, though, that there is a lot of folklore in the audiophile circles and that what people “feel” to be superior may have nothing to do with scientific knowledge. Perhaps, how could we expect anything different? Individual sensorial experiences are very difficult to classify or rate.
This is a purpose built device with the highest possible audio specs. There’s a few entries in this emerging market:
Sony Walkman NWZ-ZX1 – great audio specs, runs android, full networking – 128gb w/no expansion – no line out ~ $800 (not available in US yet)
http://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/hd-walkman-digital-music-players/…
Fiio X5 – great audio specs, 128gb w/2 slots for expansion – line out – can act as DAC only – $350
http://fiio.com.cn/products/index.aspx
PonoPlayer – great audio specs, 128gb w/1 slot for expansion – line out – ponostore promises highest quality native masters or will upgrade your purchases – legends approve! – $400
http://www.ponomusic.com/#home
Advantages to going the DAP route:
-will free up your computer
-will free up your headphone jack
-gives ability to turn the music down slightly and still use your computer’s audio for other things
-128gb + cards can replace most of the drive space for music
– UM, it will SOUND MUCH BETTER than any laptop made ever – does anyone even care about this anymore?
even if you use your DAP to play mp3 or Ogg, it’s still going to sound that much better and be dedicated to playing music at the highest quality.
I think we can barely remember the joy of having high quality music mobile. You could actually plug into other, larger systems and crank it (unlike with a phone) and who wants to open a laptop every time they need to listen to music?
Just my $.02. all this hand wringing over which app to use to play low quality sound out of your laptop seems to be missing the actual point of it all – the best listening experience.
sound isn’t words or data, it’s analog and it takes more work than you might think to digitize and un-digitize it again for your ears. computers doing 50 others things aren’t very good at playing music.
if you really love music you’d do good to examine the overall quality of your playback system, as this is what emotionally does it for us when it comes to music, not app features or UI’s.
especially if you listen to any “real” music and not EDM all day ;-).
Edited 2014-04-23 15:29 UTC
-One more item on the desk and to keep charged.
-It’s not like you’ll be using two headphones simultaneously anyways, so what’s the benefit?
-I’m not even aware of any modern music player app that didn’t allow you to turn volume up or down. It doesn’t change the volume of all the sounds on the PC, only the output of the player, so again, no benefit here.
Does it, really? Most of the difference comes from the file format, and PCs can play FLAC-files just fine, and since these DAPs are supposed to be used with headphones there’s no reason the same headphones couldn’t be used with laptops or desktops.
Most phones come with a headphone jack, so.. well, you know, you actually can.
I could just as well ask why would somebody want to carry yet-another device with them when most of the difference in listening to music comes from the speakers/headphones and file-formats used.
Drop that elitist attitude right there; part of the whole listening experience is the ease at which you can control it, and as such all these features and UIs are totally meaningful.
yeah i’ll give you that one. something else with a battery.
well, i like the music to not need to be interrupted if i need to hear some video or get a call or something. not everyone in the world has headphones on all day. anyone with a home office, for instance, can crank music to their hearts content.
same thing as above – the player is controlling the player, single use, simple, won’t need to be shuffled with 4 other things that might need the audio output at that moment. of course all apps can turn the volume and down i hope you know i didn’t think they couldn’t.
sorry it really does which is why musicians don’t use the mini ports to record on laptops.
this is the golden rule of audio – overall sound quality is determined by everything in the chain, from source to the end (speakers in this case). higher quality source will always improve everything after it. garbage in = garbage out, and the inverse of that is also true.
then when you factor in the DAC chips that these things use verses your laptop, if you talk about the discreet amps they use, the properly shielded and filtered electronics, the lack of crosstalk from the various radios, antennas, and sensors in your laptop, the true line out port, and the simple fact that it’s made to play music as nicely as possible, you should see that yes, it should have a significantly higher playback quality then any laptop, at any volume.
i said crank it. if you’ve ever tried to play an mp3 player through a PA system you better be using some horribly recorded music or everyone will cover their ears in pain, or at least hit you with “really?” expressions.
it’s not elitist to bring up that none of this discussion actually mentioned sound quality. it’s like quality no longer exists, but only in music audio. everywhere else people want better quality with higher specs. but the ignorance of our auditory system and the arrogance of techno lust leave me being an elitist.
if you love music you should care if it’s being taken away, stripped, removed, and desecrated in the name of bad science and technology marketing.
OK, they are portable devices, which is a good thing, but the other arguments you used are only valid if you are using your computer analog audio jack.
That is not what I use or recommend to friends that really enjoy music. For them, a media center build around a board with SPDIF-out, HDMI or DVI coupled with a good amplifier with lots of different digital input connectors is a must. Any quality degradation on amplifier, cables and all are going to be ridiculously minimal when compared to what is lost on speakers, even quality ones.
I have a friend that even went to extra quality, very expensive, power and sound cables. I tried to dismiss his obsession and argued that he could still get top quality with just good cables but did not insist. The worst thing that can happen is if someone listen your advices and latter “feel” that something is not up to the desired quality they wanted, what is quite common for sound enthusiasts. I guess, that is why we see vinyl long plays being produced today. 😉
The devices you cited look nice, but no thanks.
I run a fan site for my favorite band, I had jinzora running on it and I liked the features but ran into an issue with a german character in their name that wouldn’t display correctly on the web page. I’d like to find something that works as well as jinzora, but is better supported as last time I checked their website vanished and it doesn’t look like anyone has done anything with their sourceforge page in quite some time either. I’m not a programmer so I cant just fix it myself…
but anyways back on topic. I like and still use winamp for my mp3 player on my windows systems, on my linux systems I usually use amarok