[LAU] Decent and attractive audio player

[Rob]

On Sunday 27 April 2008 08:38, pete shorthose wrote:
> > all way. I like all my music to be easy to search and there is
> > 200gb of it.
> so like you, i'm still waiting for the RightThingTM to come along.
> until that day, it's xmms for me.
> sad but true.

I'm in the same boat (100GB+ of music, all ripped over the course of 
several years from CDs I own.)  I also listen to music more on my 
Archos jukebox than any of my PCs.  So, rather than use one style of 
organization on the PCs (maintaining a separate database for each 
one, or using MPD which means I have to use a different program to 
play files from the network than local files) and another on the 
Archos, I navigate my collection using Konqueror, play songs or 
playlists with xmms (I'd rather a simple, native-UI player that 
supports playlists and EQ but doesn't feature retarded teenage 
boy "skins", but have yet to find one) and rsync those same songs and 
playlists over to the Archos to play in the car. 

Additionally, I have scripts that allow me to rip, encode and ID3-tag 
CDs on all my PCs simultaneously, saving them on the server and 
updating a MySQL database with CD and track info to avoid duplication 
or name collisions in the case of reissues.  Instead of taking 4 
years to rip all my CDs, it probably wouldn't have gotten done at all 
if I had to rip one CD at a time. (At one point, I was ripping 8 at a 
time thanks to multiple drives on multiple machines.)

I keep my per-song and per-album content tags in the MySQL database 
too, and can generate playlists based on them.  I'm working on a 
rating system so I can say "give me 2gb of songs from this playlist" 
and it takes out the lowest-rated ones till it fits.  Finally, I have 
a second, parallel copy of all my music in heavily compressed (both 
bitrate- and audio-wise, like FM radio) form for use in noisy cars 
like mine, since the Archos and most other players don't feature 
built-in compression.  

Every "music database" system I've seen makes most or all of this 
stuff a huge pain in the ass, but using Konqueror to navigate and 
xmms to play works just fine.  But yes, xmms is old, like GTK1 old, 
and the skins reek of Incredimail.  Whatever happened to music 
players that are about playing music and not maintaining a library?  
Consider that in Amarok, the main window is the library view and the 
actual player is a little popup thing you have to open manually.  I 
think that's very telling.

Rob