My Quest to Build the Ultimate Music Player

http://andrewkelley.me/post/quest-build-ultimate-music-player.html

by AndyKelley • 12 years ago

370 152 12 years ago

Edmond2• 12 years ago

seems like a lot of work...any reason you didn't just hack on something like rhythmbox? It has an API for interfacing via a browser.

I built a python plugin with a web and android interface a few years back: http://code.google.com/p/rhythmote/

Still serves my needs excellently.

mattgreenrocks• 12 years ago

I posit that the "just work on X," where X is the dominant player does not contribute anything to the discussion. Why can't we trust people to have investigated this possibility ahead of time?

Given the author's level of gumption, I'm glad he's not hacking on Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox is probably my favorite music player, but it's good to shake things up.

Edmond2• 12 years ago

He's certainly within his right to work on whatever he wants. From an effort vs impact perspective however, it is usually better to build on something than reinvent.

In fact I would say this is major drawback on the Linux platform where there's a lot of duplication of effort that ends in half-baked solutions.

In any case, I merely asked; as I said the OP is free to pursue his interest as he sees fit.

zenbowman• 12 years ago

The number one reason is that you learn more when you experiment and try doing it on your own.

Same reason Ritchie and Thompson didn't continue to try to improve MULTICS.

ProAm• 12 years ago

Exactly. You learn more by doing.

mbrock• 12 years ago

Well, you learn more about some things and less about some other things.

jablan• 12 years ago

Can you install rhythmbox on a Pi without pulling whole GUI circus with it? OP already said he had started hacking on MPD (which IMO is much more suitable as a starting point than Rhythmbox), and gave up for really good and well elaborated reasons.

dsirijus2• 12 years ago

Interesting quest. But princess is in another castle, in bed with Peter Pawlowski, listening to Zelda soundtrack in foobar2000.

pit3• 12 years ago

foobar2000 is the best reason to use Windows.

aaronem19• 12 years ago

I've had good results running it over Wine on OS X. I see no reason why it shouldn't work at least as well under Linux, subject to that platform's perennial audio output woes.

AndyKelley14• 12 years ago

What are the killer features of this princess?

aaronem19• 12 years ago

The ability to play every music format under the sun; an infinitely configurable UI; a reasonably broad plugin ecosystem, albeit not one which encourages new developers very well.

dsirijus2• 12 years ago

I can tell you some things that appealed to me initially, if it helps - OS native UI, lightweight, nice separation of core and plugin features, core working flawlessly, very extensive plugin ecosystem, customizability, automatic tagging, fast media library indexing.

EC1• 12 years ago

For the love of god, WHAT is a good music player for Mac? Going from Foobar2000 (PC) -> iTunes (MAC) is awful.

wlesieutre• 12 years ago

iTunes killed all competition for a long time, but a lot of smaller players without all the baggage are popping back up these days.

I haven't tried most of these, but Ecoute is well done.

http://mashable.com/2013/07/31/alternatives-to-itunes/

http://pixiapps.com/ecouteosx/

TarpitCarnivore• 12 years ago

iTunes is still a serviceable player and works well for standard formats.

Vox is lightweight and can read a ton of file formats, as well as load up your iTunes library. I think you can set it to auto-load a directory at launch as well.

Audivarna is also supposed to be pretty good.

coffeedrinker• 12 years ago

I really like Clementine and since I triple boot (Linux, Mac, Windows) I wanted a player that would work the same regardless of OS.

aaronem19• 12 years ago

What really crosses me about iTunes on OS X is that there seems to be no way to pry the media control keys loose from it, which I found perennially vexatious back when I still had an Apple laptop.

pmh• 12 years ago

I just use foobar via Wine.

Some hopefully helpful links:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=7726...

https://github.com/xeoron/foobar2000-mac

iloveyouocean• 12 years ago

Enqueue is fantastic.

Simple, efficient, plays a wide range of formats (including FLAC, APE), auto-scans music folders, etc.

zenocon• 12 years ago

J. River Media Center is a fantastic media player for Windows. Recently they have ported it to Mac [2] and an early port is available for Linux. The Mac port was still a little buggy last I tried, but a quick scan of the absolute features identified in the OP blog seem to be covered. I use it on Windows as a Media Center to serve audio/video/pics to all the devices in my home via DLNA.

[1] http://www.jriver.com/ [2] http://www.jriver.com/download.html

smutticus• 12 years ago

I'm relatively happy with Nightingale. Could be better but it works fine for 90% of my needs. http://getnightingale.com/

pit3• 12 years ago

It hasn't been updated in over four years, but Cog (http://cogx.org/) is wonderfully simple.

antidaily• 12 years ago

None. Rdio.

archagon• 12 years ago

Alas, I have resorted to using VLC, which really isn't that bad.

nmridul• 12 years ago

I've used miro - http://getmiro.com.

aaronem19• 12 years ago

I'd like to agree with you on that, and a year ago I would have done, but foobar2000 has some problems which, combined with its closed-source nature, have driven me out of bed with it and back to the music-player equivalent of Match.com, with occasional late-night trips to the corner of YouTube and Audiobox.fm, when I'm looking to play something right now and can't find satisfaction anywhere else.

I think that metaphor sort of got away from me toward the end. In any case, foobar2000's support for HTTPS streaming is lousy ranging to unusable; specifically, there is no mechanism, including the Windows CA certificate store, by which foobar2000 can be induced to accept a self-signed certificate as valid. When you can't stream music from home over your Comcast circuit without getting throttled because Comcast assumes MP3 data going upstream means BitTorrent, this poses a problem.

There's also the problem of the playback queue not working the way it should. In theory, a playback queue is to a playlist as a lambda is to a named function; in practice, when foobar2000 reaches the end of a queue, it blithely continues playing tracks off the playlist whence came the last item in the queue, which is frankly ridiculous. I can understand from an implementation perspective why it works that way, but that doesn't make it any less broken.

These are the reasons why I'm looking for a better music player. I wish I had any hope of ever finding one.

MichaelGG• 12 years ago

Comcast assumes MP3 data going upstream means BitTorrent

They actually scan TCP segments for MP3 headers or something?

weland2• 12 years ago

I don't listen to online radios much and when I do, mplayer handles the ones I like just fine, so this is an honest question: why on earth do you need to stream over HTTPS?

ANTSANTS4• 12 years ago

In any case, foobar2000's support for HTTPS streaming is lousy ranging to unusable; specifically, there is no mechanism, including the Windows CA certificate store, by which foobar2000 can be induced to accept a self-signed certificate as valid. When you can't stream music from home over your Comcast circuit without getting throttled because Comcast assumes MP3 data going upstream means BitTorrent, this poses a problem.

This is a scenario where I wish foobar2000 was open source so this could be fixed independently, but have you tried mentioning this to the developer? Very few people are going to run into this problem, I think it's acceptable for them to miss this use case on the first try. As a last resort, I'm sure there's a plugin to transcode on the fly to vorbis or something.

in practice, when foobar2000 reaches the end of a queue, it blithely continues playing tracks off the playlist whence came the last item in the queue, which is frankly ridiculous. I can understand from an implementation perspective why it works that way, but that doesn't make it any less broken.

It may seem broken to you, but to others it's useful functionality and the way I expect things to work. I use it all the time to queue up a certain album in a large playlist just by queuing the first track. Easier than selecting the whole thing, and I'd rather have something play when the album's done than be met by silence. If you double click a song to play it, it goes to the next song when it finishes. Why would making a short queue do anything different?

Maybe there is a case for having an option for queues to work like you want, but frankly, this is yet another scenario where the existing tools work just fine to begin with. Make a new playlist and change to "Default" mode and it will stop playback after it completes. Unlike with the queue, which is only intended for short queues, you can easily order things however you like on the fly this way.

There's something like a "UNIX philosophy" argument going on here: Most people agree that it's simpler to use text files for configuration instead of introducing a unique binary format with its own unique editor for every single program you might want to use. Similarly, I think it's simpler and more powerful to just work with the cheap and easy playlist primitive rather than try to hard-code everyone's special snowflake pet feature and getting a bloated, incomprehensible mess of a program. You can convince yourself you need all of these subtly different ways to group a bunch of songs together and always be in search of something more... or you can just make a playlist, which does the exact same thing if you squint a little, and be happy with just about any music player since Winamp.

That it is closed source is a big problem to me, but if "not being able to stream over self-signed https connections" and "the queue mechanism is kinda different than I expected" are the biggest problems you have with foobar, you don't really have anything to complain about.

ubercow135• 12 years ago

I disagree with your point about the queue behaviour. If you want it to work like that, why not just use another playlist? The queue as it is actually complements the normal playlist-centric behaviour instead of being completely redundant.

If you want it to work how you describe you can use this http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_stop_after_que...

asgard1024• 12 years ago

I also had a quest to build the ultimate music player. My motivation was that most music players got complicated to the point I was unable to use them.

My player is 200 lines of Python, utilizing MPD and Qt (for Docker icon), and has about 3 features. It plays all the mp3 in a directory (including subdirs) randomly, and you can "like" or "dislike" song, which modifies the probability of it being played (and these data are remembered in MPD database). Also has "pause" and "next song" buttons (from the tray menu) and that's it, literally.

To each his own, but that's my personal definition of "ultimate".

JTon• 12 years ago

Sounds good to me too. I'd like to set a "mood" as well. The probabilities for each track adjust based on the mood selected (aside: in the future the mood selection will be automatically and accurately determined via bio-sensors :)

fragmede2• 12 years ago

utilizing MPD

Yeah, that's a non-starter for reasons that are well described in the post. (But to each their own.)

eikenberry2• 12 years ago

The only substantive criticism of MPD in the article was it oddly choosing APEv2 for it's replay-gain headers on MP3s. This is fairly easy to work around using one of the various scripts that will add the APEv2 tags to mp3s and MPD has good support for Flac and Ogg-Vorbis replay-gain tags.

But it's cool to see more going on in this space. MPD has really been the only player on the field for to long. Hopefully it will work with ffmpeg as it is seeing most of the active development these days and looks to be back in Debian soon [ https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=729203 ].

aaronem19• 12 years ago

I'd try something like that, but most of what I listen to is from the common-practice era, so the quantum of content is not an individual file, but a playlist. "Shuffle" therefore doesn't work for me; what I really need is a player whose playlists can contain either individual files or other playlists.

I wouldn't have thought this would be all that outré a desire, but apparently everyone who's ever implemented a music player disagrees with me...

drenei• 12 years ago

Not sure if you're on the OS X / iTunes ecosystem...

You can have a playlist that is made up of other playlists by creating a smart playlist and adding a rule that includes songs from source playlists of your choice. This will atomically include any changes you make to the source playlists.

I manage my music with genres — and to a large part, stay away from smart playlists — however they can be a powerful feature.

maxerickson3• 12 years ago

Foobar 2000 has a 'Shuffle Albums' mode. I guess other players would too.

Even if your music doesn't quite fit into that box, it could be abused to do what you want (multi song collections turn into albums given the same album name, a single file has some other album name so is it's own album).

I made sure to check that the mode respects order within the albums.

Edit: And you can tweak the album grouping, so you wouldn't have to destroy album tags to make it work, just use some custom tag for the grouping.

GuiA• 12 years ago

Congrats! This is fantastic.

If you can write code, I highly recommend taking a stab at writing yourself the tools that you use the most (whether that is a music player, chat client, text editor, etc.).

Sure, it isn't trivial - but modern languages and libraries (I'm a big fan of Python, both for the language and its ecosystem) make it a very reasonable project. You can get an MVP working in a few weeks of work (if you spend 5-10 hours a week on it), and then you can add features and tweak the thing over the months and years as you use it.

And in the end, you get a piece of software that you deeply know, to which you can add any feature you want, that is customized to fit perfectly in your workflow, etc. It's a bit of work, but it's really cool and IMO one of the neatest things you can do for yourself as a programmer. Additionally, if it's something that works well for you, chances are that other people will like it- open sourcing it and getting other people to use it is a high of its own.

I'm working on a few such apps myself (todo list, mail client, and a few others), as console applications using ncurses to make something with a responsive, smart, effective and efficient style of UI that I don't think has been done before (mostly because no one has been trying to innovate in the domain of console applications in the past 20 years- but I think interesting things can be done). When I'm at an interesting point, I'll open source it and write a few posts about it.

I hear the naysayers saying that it's a waste of time, that there are already 8000 different open source mail clients and music players and todo lists apps and that it's better to contribute to old open source projects than create your own, etc... those arguments aren't wrong, but IMO they don't outweigh the pros I outlined above.

This talk by Gary Bernhardt is relevant: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world

phaylon• 12 years ago

If it is just for a first try to experiment with structuring those kinds of application, or if your needs aren't even that complicated, it can even be quite close to trivial sometimes. But it's hard to know what is out there, and how useful it would be. Things that I've done on the side that weren't too hard and even more fun than I imagined beforehand:

* Media Players (Video and Audio) with GStreamer (0.10 can be okay'ish, 1.0 is very nice so far)

* Text Editors (via Gtk-Source or embedded GVim)

* I've tried building a specialized browser with WebKit. Was also quite easily used, except that I gave up when trying to get the Flash plugin to run turned out to be not-fun. Others may have more motivation.

Note that I mostly try these things in Gtk2/3 with either Perl 5 or Vala. Python seems to have very good Gtk/GObject bindings as well, so that should mostly apply the same way. And I'm sure if you look at the Qt and Wx ecosystems there will also be many preexisting useful components, or ways to plug them in.

jfreedom• 12 years ago

I really like this kind of solution for android stuff. There are some very specific things that I end up doing all of the time and it's relatively easy to write the thing that solves my exact problem in the fewest number of screen taps. I'm not sure if it saves me time overall, but I also enjoy solving the problem.

stevekemp• 12 years ago

I'm working on a few such apps myself (todo list, mail client, and a few others), as console applications using ncurses to make something with a responsive, smart, effective and efficient style of UI that I don't think has been done before

I'd love to see what you're doing there, as I've spent the past few months working on a console mail-client, and reached a point where I have to decide to leave it alone or start v2 now I've learned more about how I handle email.

spotco• 12 years ago

This is absolutely true. You'll come to love the tools you make (and hopefully other people will too!)

I'd love to write my own text editor, though I imagine that I'd want a whole lot more features than my "optimal" music player (probably some sort of autocomplete, syntax checking, heck just make it a full-blown multi-language IDE).

By random coincidence, I've been writing (and using for the past year) my own super minimalist ncurses music player (https://github.com/spotco/ScrapePlayerDESKTOP , one python file, powered by sox and most likely only works on OSX).

My needs were definitely very different from the OP (I just wanted the ability to play music by all folder, and all folder recursively), but it's really interesting to see other people's versions of their "optimal" player.

daurnimator3• 12 years ago

This article rings true with me on so many points.

I spent years searching for, and coding my dream music player/manager. Going through tens of different backends, servers, etc, not limited to: - MediaMonkey: windows only - Amarok: terrible interface, slow and hard to extend - foobar2000: closed source/windows only/columns UI stopped working - MPD: Just not enough, also poor codec support (I use wavpack) - xmms2: was a baby at the time - ExFalso

I started coding my own, dubbed lomp: https://code.google.com/p/lomp/ I solved so many interesting issues that seemed to plague other music software: I got client/server working, output redirection, even ended up coding my own library management, then tagging library. Tangentaly, tagging is HARD, no one does it correctly. The best library I found on ANY platform or in ANY language was Mutagen, part of the Quodlibet https://code.google.com/p/quodlibet/ project; but even it got a few things wrong. I eventually tried to split off my efforts as 'lamt' https://github.com/daurnimator/lamt but didn't dedicate enough time. Also worked on a wide range of front ends: console, web, etc.

But as I coded this media player, I could never settle on a decoding or output library; I went through SO many: - controling mplayer/cplay/aplay via a pipe - libvlc - gstreamer - Phonon - libavcodec But none were enough, or way too buggy... After years of failing, I decided I better just do it myself, so I started again: https://github.com/daurnimator/lomp2/ This time using LuaJIT's brand new (at the time) ffi to directly talk to libao (which I found to be the best cross platform audio output solution)

I ran out of time to work on lomp when I was at university, and now I have a job that keeps me busy. I wonder how many of my pain points you guys have solved.....

Feel free to reach out to me if you want to discuss more.

AndyKelley14• 12 years ago

I'm particularly interested in your opinions on tagging. Can you explain what most software gets wrong about tagging?

Here's the plan so far, although it's not implemented: https://github.com/andrewrk/groovebasin/issues/30

The idea is that you might edit tags for a file which doesn't even support tags, such as AAC. So it would let you do that, and the changes would then be reflected in the DB. However we would also have a UI pane for "Suggested Library Fixes" or something like that. This would be things like moving files to their canonical location, updating incorrect duration tags, duplicate file detection, etc. It would also have suggestions like this:

* These songs have tag edits that you have made but they cannot be saved. Do you accept this change? (Proposed change: wrap the file in a container format which supports tags)

daurnimator3• 12 years ago

I'm particularly interested in your opinions on tagging. Can you explain what most software gets wrong about tagging?

First up, tagging is such a personal preference, from the highest level things like which fields to fill in (e.g. Album Artist), to small differences (e.g. do tracknumbers have a leading 0?), but also technical differences and compatibility choices (e.g. which tagging format? for MP3 you can have any of APE1, APE2, ID3v1 or ID3v2.{2,3,4})

Next these different tagging formats are in no way uniform: APE2 and vorbiscomments are a string map with some generally agreed upon conventions, ID3v1 has very limited fields, ID3v2 is extremely over specified with a tag for everything in practice this just seems to mean that every program gets them wrong somewhere. There are several other formats too...

Next, the tagging systems are very tricky to locate and modify: they all have various forms of headers, footers, padding, and odd storage formats. e.g. flac/vorbiscomments keep swapping back and forth betweeen little and big endien. This is made mode complex by the various fighting container formats that have their own escaping, rules etc on top e.g. Ogg, MPEG, Matroska....

To make things even harder, things aren't even correct without context. To take the duration issue from the article, VBR MP3 has no way to calculate duration without completely parsing the files: this takes too long for most files (reading the whole file into memory just to get the length???? no way!) so there's all sorts of heuristics and weird headers (e.g. Xing)

adamzochowski• 12 years ago

There are many issues with tags:

- multi language - id3v2 tags support having multiple title tags. Yet software will assume there is only one, and won't show alternative titles. This becomes problem when exactly same song has multiple names, one in original script, one transliterated, one English translation.

- old international tags - most software can't deal with Russian KOI8 and Polish Mazovia at the same time

- multiple artists - there are songs that are collaborations of multiple artists. For example: 'Will.I.Am & Brittney Spears' gets treated as own artist, as opposed to collaboration. Music Brainz and Discogs handles this in their data.

- alternative artist names - Some artists produce under alternative names. Most tags assume that 'Norman Cook' and 'FatBoy Slim' are two different artists. Same with 'Richard James' and 'Aphex Twin'. Discogs handles this

- hierarchical, multiple genre tags - Most software supports simple genre tags. Few applications can handle multiple genre tags. What about tag hierarchy (ie: Rock -> Symphonic Rock -> Kraut Rock?).

- Extended info tags: mood, style, bpm, key - Sometimes when I am melancholy I care for love songs, I don't care for genre, it can be jazz, or death metal (last.fm data contains enough to map mood/style/decades). When I DJ, I need info on BPM and Key (ie: A Minor), so that one song fits the next. (from Echonest / Beatport support this)

- composer vs performer - for classical music it is as important to know who composed a piece (ie: Chopin - Funeral March) as who was the perfomer (was it Rubenstein or Padarewski)

- spoken word - music listening is quite different from spoken word, like audiobooks. Most software sees just a music file and doesn't handle proper spoken word distinction, while use case is very different

- tag sources - while writting tags, there should be additional tag saying where it came from. Foobar's Foo_discogs and Foo_musicBrainz plugins will write source ID, so that at a later time songs can be updated to online db (assuming discogs/musicbrains has updated their db entry)

- song popularity - there are tags to track song popularity and ratings, yet most software ignores it, or does this badly themselves

- stand alone songs vs mixed songs - some albums / artists have stand alone songs. These can be listened to randomly. Other albums will have songs flow one into another (listen to any Jean Michelle Jarre album, or live dance music split into tracks). There is no proper handling of how these flow

- replay gain - most software is not smart to handle album vs song replay gain properly. Not to mention that there are two types of replay gain for mp3s alone. One will change quantization values, one will write tags.

- images - APIC tag adds image support, yet most software barely reads cover APIC, and ignores remaining APIC (like label logos). Not to mention that this is lost space as each song in album will contain own APIC, making a duplicate of images.

- label tags - Some people like to listen music based on the label that published it. UKF Dubstep, Monstercat, or Ninja Tune are just some labels that people keep track of.

- alternative versions - some songs will have alternative versions, I don't mean remixes or covers by someone else, but main artist will often release few copies of the song. Sometimes the difference is in swear words (explicit vs censored), othertimes it is matter of length (original 7 minute mix vs radio 3 minute mix), other times it is matter of single having vocal vs instrumental versions. Sometimes it is a matter of live recording (ie: mtv unplugged). Most software will either assume songs are different because title tag is different, or will assume they are exactly same.

- sort tag - artists have one name they are to be displayed while should be sorted differently. For example: The Beatles should be under letter 'B'. Most software sucks at this, even though we have the tags, they are not there.

- album subtitle - some albums will have CD1 and CD2 with a subname. For example two cd album 'Destination Lounge: New York City', has CD1 subtitled 'Relax' and CD2 'Revive'. Most software either will need to drop the per cd subtitle, or will split and consider CD1 as separate album from CD2. http://musicbrainz.org/release/cec1efa8-6541-4f9c-8f55-c86b1...

These are just some off top of my head.

dangravell• 12 years ago

Not sure if you are interested but I maintain an entire blog on the subject... http://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/categor... (that's just one category, see others) please note: this is my own commercial site. It'd be great to discuss with you!

existencebox• 12 years ago

Hi darnimator,

Your statement rings VERY TRUE to me as much as the original article, and there may be an opportunity here. I've spent some time (I'm sure not nearly as much as you have) hacking on this problem, but primarily from the library management aspect, and I lean on VLC plugins for play/streaming. This seems to mesh quite nicely with the sides of this that you touch; tagging and such are exactly the sort of problems I'd find most compelling, whereas I'm quite out of my league in the media aspects of it. (my biggest "pain points" were good integration of torrenting/a programmable pipeline for dealing with torrents, library organization, and various distributed features... less pain points I guess, and more things I found compelling enough to not procrastinate on hacking on.)

I also have a job that eats my time, but if you would like to trade contact info, I'd be more than happy for a chance to pick the brain of someone who's been attacking this longer than I have, as well as potentially see what could come of it.

daurnimator3• 12 years ago

directly talk to libao (which I found to be the best cross platform audio output solution)

Whoops, libao was a dead end too :P

I meant OpenAL

Searching for a link just now, it looks like it died in the last couple of years :(

We can look in the wayback machine.... http://web.archive.org/web/20130729040534/http://connect.cre... The OpenAL soft project http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html website is still up at least.

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

The solution is to analyze each song before playing it to figure out how "loud" it sounds to humans. Then the music player adjusts the playback volume of each track to compensate for the perceived loudness. This way, the user does not have to adjust the volume for each track that comes on.

This is just going to perpetuate the arms race, because it's not hard to spoof that sort of thing by monkeying around with crest factors in transient designers, plus people seem to have quite different preferences for compression/limiting. Just tweaking gain and falling back to compression/limiting past a certain threshold is just going to lead to pumping on some program material.

There is a standard for measuring this stuff, and thanks to years of people like me complaining about jumps in volume during commercial breaks on TV and the like, a loudness-measuring standard has been formalized and is being demanded by broadcast regulators (so it will become standard in audio production software over the next year or three). It's here: http://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/bs/R-REC-BS.1770-3-2...

Waves, Dolby, Izotope etc. have all released plugins or free updates for 1770-3 comaptibility so it should become ubiquitous by mid-decade, as will automatic loudness normalization at the mastering stage, which wasn't previously possible in the absence of an industry-standard metric.

AndyKelley14• 12 years ago

This is exactly what the EBU R128 standard specifies. It references ITU-R BS.1770. So Groove Basin is already doing exactly what you have prescribed!

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

I missed the bit about R128, thanks for pointing that out.

saw-lau• 12 years ago

I use iVolume - http://www.mani.de/en/ivolume/ - with iTunes on a Mac as an attempt to solve the loudness problem, and it seems to work quite well to my untrained ears.

johnchristopher• 12 years ago

At some point I plan to write a tutorial article detailing exactly how to get this application running on a Raspberry Pi. It's mostly straightforward but there are enough "gotchas" here and there that I think it could be a useful article.

I'd be really interested in reading that.

splat• 12 years ago

This looks really cool! As a classical music fan, the one feature that I've always wanted but have never found is the ability to link several tracks together. Often times classical CDs break up a single piece into multiple tracks, so if you're listening to your library on shuffle, you will often jump into the middle of a piece, which is annoying. It would be so cool if there were a music player where you could link several tracks together as one piece so that shuffle would always start from the beginning and wouldn't shuffle away until the end.

gagege• 12 years ago

iTunes can (or used to) do that, believe it or not.

aaronem19• 12 years ago

How, though? As discussed elsewhere in the thread, it doesn't seem as though "smart playlists" are quite that smart, and I'm not familiar enough with iTunes to make a guess as to how else it might be accomplished.

silviogutierrez• 12 years ago

It seems like that's only possible now when importing/ripping CDs. For existing tracks, it doesn't work.

However, you can right click a group of tracks, then edit the info to add a unique Grouping label. This allows you to shuffle by grouping.

In fact, iTunes purchases - at least some of them - already include this. Screenshot: http://cl.ly/image/3w0R0y1I0E0V

AndyKelley14• 12 years ago

Interesting idea. I've thought about that too, for songs that seamlessly transition into each other. The tricky part is how to incorporate that into the UI in a way that is not confusing and doesn't add a bunch of clutter.

thathonkey2• 12 years ago

Seems like the type of thing that you would have needed to consider pretty early in the architecture of the application. At least to be done elegantly. You'd probably need the ability to have track entries that are "faux" (not mapped from a media file) metadata track entries that the app understands and will spider out to the real files/tracks behind the scenes whenever encountered in a playlist or whatever play context.

That might not be trivial at this stage. But yeah, I agree, the trickiest part would be crafting an intuitive UI around the feature.

chops• 12 years ago

I could not agree more. I wrote about this exact thing a year and a half ago: http://sigma-star.com/blog/post/startup-idea--classical-musi...

One day this will happen, and classical music enthusiasts everywhere will rejoice.

hypersoar• 12 years ago

Modern music players and online stores are really neglectful of classical music. I downloaded an album of Jascha Heifetz recordings from the Google Play store, and the track titles are all of the form "Violin Concerto in D Major", "Violin Concerto no. 2", etc, with no indication at all of who composed which piece. The tagging is terribly inconsistent, with the artist sometimes being the composer, sometimes the orchestra, sometimes the conductor, sometimes the soloist, sometimes an arbitrary subset of all those.

I'd really like for someone to make a music player or online store that worked better with classical music. Hell, I'd settle for one that didn't suck.

coldtea• 12 years ago

iTunes can do that -- and it was added specifically for classical music. It's even called Groupping.

Another nice feature it has, is that it lets you handle albums with various artists as one entity, that is, you can set those tracks as "part of a compilation".

chiph• 12 years ago

The Redbook audio specification allows for indexes (ability to have tracks within tracks), which was intended for jumping to the next movement within classical pieces. I haven't seen the buttons for this on a CD player (real or virtual) since the late 1980s.

joshka• 12 years ago

The best way I've found to handle this for DJ sets is to use a single MP3 file and a CUE sheet with the times each subtrack starts. Then your media player has to support CUE sheets (Winamp has/had a plugin, Foobar2000 does, other than those YMMV). Matroska Audio showed promise in being the format where this would just work out of the box, but loses due to first mover advantage of mp3s and the market reach of other formats.

ANTSANTS4• 12 years ago

You don't really need special support for this. Most music players have a mode for shuffling albums at a time, not individual tracks. Just make a classical playlist and select that mode.

As for shuffling your entire library, I don't understand why you'd want to do that. I get in the mood for certain genres; I don't want to jump from Rainbow to nordloef to Massive Attack randomly over the course of 10 minutes.

sbtrct• 12 years ago

iTunes will let you do this when you're importing a cd. From memory, you right click on the tracks you want joined (before they're imported) and select the appropriate option. The only drawback is that iTunes Match (if you use it) won't match the joined file, so it'll have to upload manually.

chli• 12 years ago

I think you're looking for Media Monkey + http://www.mediamonkey.com/addons/browse/item/linkedtracks/

I don't use this plugin myself but this looks like it's exactly what you want...

ubercow135• 12 years ago

If you aren't referring just to shuffling albums, as opposed to tracks, which many players can do, then you can achieve what you want with foobar, using this component: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=7746...

thebiglebrewski• 12 years ago

Hey way to go Andrew! -Zach

ammmir• 12 years ago

That's funny, seems like a lot of us have built music players because none have seemed adequate :)

I built CloudPlay (http://cloudplay.fm) because I wasn't satisfied with Mac music players and none supported streaming from YouTube or SoundCloud. At the time, I had also been itching to build my first Mac app, so what better opportunity to learn Objective-C/Cocoa and improve my music listening experience?

It turned out to be a longer journey than it should have. I got most of it working in a month or two, but I spent too much time with unnecessary detours like:

- writing a low-level audio streaming framework that I scrapped once I discovered a higher-level API

- building a basic search index and deciding to use LuaJIT (!) to implement it, thereby requiring me to build my own Objective-C/Lua bridge, only to discover that the OS already provided a full-text search framework

Yes, I could've read the documentation more carefully, but it's also easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole building stuff from scratch for the sake of exploration. Sometimes building at a lower level helps you appreciate and understand the higher level and why you shouldn't always reinvent the wheel :)

jfb• 12 years ago

But that's what's fun about what we do.

ecdavis2• 12 years ago

One problem that really interests me is the "dynamic playlist." Once your music library becomes sufficiently large and diverse, simply shuffling songs ceases to be an acceptable way to listen to music. You'll randomly switch between vastly different genres, come across tracks that aren't enjoyable outside the context of an album, jump in halfway through some pieces. It's a mess.

I wrote a simple script which uses Last.fm data to generate a "path" through the artists in my music library based on their similarities. It's very far from perfect, but it suffices to build an album playlist which slowly takes me through several genres. Some day I'll improve it to work based on albums rather than artists.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to run queries on my music library and have an interesting playlist returned to me.

AndyKelley14• 12 years ago

I'd love to read more about this idea. You might consider doing some research and writing a piece on it.

tksb• 12 years ago

Couldn't agree more. I'd love to explore this further.

ecdavis2• 12 years ago

I've been meaning to work more on this, but my free time is fairly limited. At the very least I should probably put my script on GitHub (although it's far from groundbreaking).

For me, one of the pain points is quality of metadata. It's all very well collecting genres, tags, and similar artists from a service like Last.fm, but you need to be reasonably confident that they align with your own ideas about music. Since everyone's ideas about music are different, this puts you in a tight spot.

keenerd• 12 years ago

I've done something similar, a one-button interface hooked up to a basic machine learning backend.

http://kmkeen.com/albumbler/

dfc• 12 years ago

Ideally, I'd like to be able to run queries on my music library and have an interesting playlist returned to me.

You want Beets.[1] Anything you could possibly want is doable with the smart playlist feature[2] and the redonkulous power of the queries and metadata (chromaprint/musicbrainz/echonest). There is a plugin for last.fm genres but I have not used it. I am not sure how you got similarities from last.fm but you can definitely use the echonest data to find similar music. There was a good discussion of beets here not so long ago.

[1] http://beets.radbox.org/

[2] https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/v1.3.5/plugins/smartplaylis...

soggypopsicle• 12 years ago

I wrote the play plugin for beets last weekend that turns a query into a temporary playlist and opens it with your systems music player for just this reason.

https://github.com/davidhampgonsalves/beets-plugin-play https://github.com/sampsyo/beets/blob/master/beetsplug/play....

rdeboo• 12 years ago

Take a look at Tomahawk player (http://www.tomahawk-player.org/), which supports dynamic playlists. It uses Echonest to generate them.

baddox5• 12 years ago

The thing about loudness compensation is that it only further reduces the dynamic range of your music collection (unless you have programmatic control over the analog gain of your amplifier, which you probably don't), so the arguments for it shouldn't really appeal to dynamic range.

AndyKelley14• 12 years ago

The end result is that the music comes out sounding quieter, so the user ends up increasing the analog gain of their amplifier. This increases dynamic range because the alternative is having the highly compressed music sound very loud resulting in users keeping their amplifier gain low.

baddox5• 12 years ago

If you take the loudest song in your library, and make it quieter in software, you have further reduced the dynamic range of that song.

aaronem19• 12 years ago

A general observation, which the comments in this thread have brought to the point of perceptibility:

Perhaps only in the field of music management and playback is it considered so reasonable to suggest that an acceptable solution to lousy user interface design is to modify the otherwise well-formed data presented by that interface, rather than just to fix the interface and be done with it.

I'm not sure why this is, and I don't mean by it to denigrate people who develop music player software, but it does seem awfully odd to me by comparison with pretty much any other specialization of software design.

AndyKelley14• 12 years ago

What about the whole "everybody is doing loudness compensation wrong" issue I pointed out? That's an example of something that is not merely a user interface design issue.

aaronem19• 12 years ago

If you're referring to the comment I'm thinking of, in which you mentioned mpd not knowing how to read but one format of ReplayGain tags, then it's a good example of what I'm talking about. The correct solution to that problem is to teach mpd about other tag formats, not to require that users retag their entire music libraries to compensate.

Update: The comment I'm thinking of wasn't yours, so presumably it's not the one to which you're referring. I've looked through the thread, but I'm not sure to what you are referring. Can you link it, so that I'll be able to update this comment with a response to what you're actually talking about, instead of merely to what I incorrectly gathered you were? Thanks!

nialv7• 12 years ago

Actually what you said about mpd replaygain support is wrong. mpd support both replaygain info store in id3v2 and apev2. It even support flac replaygain.

Touche• 12 years ago

This post makes me feel bad about myself. How many "passion projects" have I started and gave up on the first time something difficult came up? Too many to count.

There are several lessons to be learned from this post. Perseverance. Starting small. Not sacrificing your vision. Willingness to go as low-level as needed. Patience. This is an inspiring post. I think I'm going to dust off one of my old projects now and get back to work.

AndyKelley14• 12 years ago

How many "passion projects" have I started and gave up on the first time something difficult came up?

Probably not as many as I have. This is the one project that I keep coming back to and the only reason it has survived so long is that I dogfood it.

FranOntanaya• 12 years ago

As simple as Audacious is, I've stuck to it for the LADSPA and Sample Rate conversion filters. I wouldn't take UI improvements over sound itself.

AndyKelley14• 12 years ago

What does Audacious's sample rate conversion filters have over libswresample?

Dewie3• 12 years ago

OT:

Gapless Playback

I find this to be an incredibly annoying feature, when it is the default. For the most part, I like to listen to songs the way they have been recorded, especially if I'm listening to albums. In addition, many of the albums that I've listened to already have somewhat of a gapless playback, in that one song bleeds into or is immediately cut off by next song. With gapless playback in the music player, then the small gap between the songs end up just being like dialing down the volume and then back up again in the span of one fifth of a second, which sounds silly.

stan_rogers• 12 years ago

Whereas, with most of the albums I listen to, the "cuts" are just time markers and the music is continuous across tracks, and a lack of gapless playback is jarring. Classical/baroque, much of classic and progressive rock, a fair amount of jazz and perhaps the entire genre of ambient/trance work out pretty much that way.

Dewie3• 12 years ago

Whereas, with most of the albums I listen to, the "cuts" are just time markers and the music is continuous across tracks, and a lack of gapless playback is jarring.

Whereas? That is exactly what I described in the last part of my post. The music bleeds into/continues or change mood at exactly the beginning of the next song. Why "whereas"?

lawn• 12 years ago

What a great effort you've done! I'm certainly tempted to try it out on a raspberry. I would appreciate a tutorial article on how to get it running.

kudu2• 12 years ago

Just wondering, does this modify the actual music files?

AndyKelley14• 12 years ago

Currently no. But it's planned that it will: https://github.com/andrewrk/groovebasin/issues/30

All modifications to music files will be done in a separate temporary file on the same device and then rename(2) will be used to atomically overwite the old file. This way race conditions and power failure have no chance of corrupting the file.

kudu2• 12 years ago

I actually think the current behaviour is a good thing. I wouldn't want my original music files to be modified.

endgame• 12 years ago

Really good article, but if you're going to bundle libraries, PLEASE provide a way to make configuration fail if you can't get to the system copy.

A lot of projects (libgroove included) will try the system copy and then fall back to the bundled copy if the system one wasn't found. That's nice for users (maybe), but it's a pain for packagers. If the packager just happens to have one of the dependencies installed, the package will automagically find it but it will have incorrect deps.

Further reading: https://blog.flameeyes.eu/2009/01/bundling-libraries-for-des...

callesgg• 12 years ago

Really really nice work thought the loudness videos was very interesting.

Personally I have moved on to spotify and more or less abandoned my old music collection.

neumann• 12 years ago

I will definitely be trying this out. I have been very happy with gmusicbrowser.

romainvv• 12 years ago

I was wondering what is the differences (pro/cons) between DLNA/UPNP protocols and your solution ? With a XBMC server, you can play song over network from any sources thanks to UPNP

ubercow135• 12 years ago

UPnP doesn't work well over the internet

Jupiterlyght• 12 years ago

Badass. Nicely done, sir.

eqbridges• 12 years ago

Great idea for a project! I too was a big fan of Amarok, and have been disappointed by music players since having used it.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned, which Amarok, excelled at but other players haven't, was dealing with large (>100gb) collections hosted over a network. Hopefully you'll include this in your testing. As well Amarok allowed you to store metadata in arbitrary databases (which QT had support for) hosted on a network, thus allowing for metadata to be shared by computers for a given account. Quite common nowadays is to use SQLite locally; however SQLite does not support working over a network :-/

Anyway, kudos and fare-thee-well!

mrweasel• 12 years ago

It may just be me being old fashion, but I haven't seen or used a good music player since XMMS. Every single new media player seems want to take up a huge amount of screen space or have a ton of useless feature.

XMMS was great, simple and pretty interface, just add the files you want to play and you could queue up tracks (A feature that seem to elude iTunes ).

jxn• 12 years ago

xmms2 seems like it fits the required bill the best, though the project is pretty stagnant and there's never been a real release. It does seem to get all the big issues right.

sandGorgon• 12 years ago

Quick question - are people listening to a lot of music through their laptops ?

do note I wrote "through" not "on" - which means that you may still have your music on your laptop, but you could be listening through your mobile (streaming through plex, dlna,etc)

I find the audio quality of listening through mobile phones to be far better than my laptop (and I have a latitude - the highest end of its generation). In general the music player is of far better quality as well (Poweramp, etc.).

The only drawback I can think of is battery consumption, which is easily solvable via a USB cable. It also works great because an incoming call will pause the music and resume when done - as opposed to manually pausing and resuming on the laptop.

And if you are on earphones with a mic, then you understand the true meaning of "gapless" - or do you prefer taking off your foam-covered in-ear 'phones every time you get a call ?

My Quest to Build the Ultimate Music Player

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