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[milo christiansen]

I need a new media player, specifically a music player application. VLC handles all my video needs, but I need something new for audio.

Currently I use WinAmp on Windows, but now I need something that works on Linux too. Right now I use Banshee, but it lacks some features I really need. No matter what I try I can't find something that has the features I need that runs on Linux and Windows (I don't own an OSX system and probably never will).

Does anyone know of a media player that supports ALL of the following features?

* Sort tracks by name, album name, album date, artist, and track number (taking disk number into account)
* Sort albums by date, name, and track count
* Sort artists by name, album count, and track count
* Easy to use support for queuing up groups of tracks into a temporary playlist
* Support for a wide range a metadata fields. I am really OCD about having all the metadata filled in.
* Supports MP3, OGG, and FLAC at a minimum

WinAmp more or less does what I want on Windows (it has some minor issues), unfortunately I can't get it working with WINE.

Banshee would be OK if it wasn't for the fact that it does not allow you to sort albums by date and it doesn't properly support a play queue.

Amarok has a "weird" interface that makes it hard to find what I want (I much prefer the three pane UI used by most other players).

All the others I have tried either have terrible performance or glaring issues that make them unsuitable. (Audacious and Rhythmbox to name two in particular). VLC just doesn't seem to be all that great for music.

I store my media library on a SMB share on my NAS, but I would prefer a shared database of some kind instead of a simple file share. Online features are not important, this will be used on an isolated LAN, no internet.

Help?

[feelotraveller]

Since you are not flooded with replies: here is a decent list of linux audio players https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications/Multimedia#Audio.  Some will work with other os.

Happy with Guayadeque myself but it is linux only. 

[milo christiansen]

Looking at the state of things I may just write my own. The player itself can be really simple, and I can throw together a DB and a front end in a reasonable amount of time. At least that way I can get all the features I want exactly how I want them.

Time to get a few audio libraries and a copy of QT I think...

[Mesa]

While it's not something I'm using right now, mpd/ncmpcpp is a pretty solid combo, although it takes a bit more setup and it's also terminal-based rather than full-on graphical. (so it's probably not very Windows friendly, Cygwin notwithstanding)

Still, might want to give that a try?


Also most people seem to prefer Clementine over Amarok (which is a fork of an earlier version of Amarok) but I'm not sure if it's what you're after either.


Also, I'd love to see you share your progress on some online Git service if you do decide to go down the DIY road!

[milo christiansen]

I probably won't share progress, as my dev machine lacks internet...

I am slowly but surely working on my own player, right now I have metadata for all the files in my library loaded into a SQLite DB, next I plan to throw together a temporary HTML frontend so I can edit the DB and assemble playlists. The actual player will be a lightweight CLI app controlled with hotkeys and a HTTP interface so the DB frontend can talk to it.

Honestly the hardest part of this project is finding libraries that work on both Windows and Linux. The actual programs are quite simple, albeit time consuming, to write.

[TheBiggerFish]

Does VLC not do that?  (i.e. have you tried?)

[milo christiansen]

VLC's UI is really ugly and poorly suited to music IMHO... So no, I didn't try very hard...

What I am doing now is writing my own, using libvlc for playback, SQLite for metadata, and a big mix of custom servers and apps in between. That way it will all work exactly the way I want. Plus it's a fun project...

[Mesa]

Way off in a distant land, someone wakes up from a nightmare in a cold sweat, realizing that somebody else out there is working on yet another music player...

Jokes aside, good luck (sad that the progress won't be shared, but oh well).

[milo christiansen]

When it's done (or done enough that everything kinda works) I'll post it.

Progress is slow though, mostly because I have lots of other things to do... Actually writing the thing is mostly easy, I just need to find the time.

[Toxicshadow]

VLC's UI is really ugly and poorly suited to music IMHO...

Couldn't have agreed more. Even, *shudders* iBotnetiTunes is better looking than VLC.

[milo christiansen]

First pass at the interface:



Currently it just loads and displays data from the DB server. Next step is allowing you to queue playlists and send them to a player (as soon as I get a player skeleton done).

The hardest part was getting scroll bars that didn't totally suck. The views don't actually scroll, each view keeps a sorted list of item IDs, and as you scroll it dynamically loads the actual data from the DB server. It is way smoother than trying to load everything. ~10000 track entries is too much for the poor browser.

If you click a heading to resort a list it reloads a new ID list. The interface is really "dumb" all the sort and filter logic is on the DB server. (I still need to implement filtering by album and/or artist by choosing them from the lists, but the logic to do it already exists on the server)

[milo christiansen]

Well, it plays music... But only due to a quick hack to work around a missing bit (specifically, you can queue up tracks, pause, etc, but there is no code to start it playing when the first track is added so it is stuck forever without a hack).

Another few hours of work and my little toy should be mostly functional. Once I get it more working than not, I think I'll head over to creative projects, so asside from once more to add a link, this is probably my last post here.

The UI is horrid, and will remain so for some time. The player mostly works, so long as it doesn't encounter anything unexpected. Honestly, the only part that is at all robust is the DB server. This thing will be an ongoing project for many, many months to come.

[milo christiansen]

RAMS: Remote Audio Metadata Server (and player)