Current mood:	frustrated
Current music:	In Banshee :-)

Why is it so hard to write a good music player?
Is it just me, or is it so extremly hard to write a good music player that no one has succeded yet? Over the years, I must have tried at least a dozen different media/music players and none, I mean not a single one, has fitted my needs to a satisfaction degree large enough for me to keep using it.

Maybe I have weird demands or something (I don't think so), but all players I've tried fails miserably on at least one or more, for me, important aspects. I'm mostly running Linux [when I'm listening to music on the computer], but the players on Windows are equally bad. Here is a quick roundup of the issues I find in the current players. I will be focusing on the issues I find important or that has annoyed me the most.

Banshee (Home)

This is the player I most often use. It's got a very nice, polished user interface, and works pretty straight forward for the basic tasks such as listening to music, quickly finding songs/artists/albums and making simple playlists. It also has iPod syncing which is good for Caroline who's got a Nano.

The player is in the iTunes/Rhythmbox category of players, i.e. a big database of all songs displayed in a standard list which can be sorted or filtered (they call it "searched", but it's really "filtering"). The bad thing is how it handles the playing - it will always use the current view as the set of songs to play, so if I have a playlist selected and it's songs are displayed in the list, banshee will play those songs. Now if I decide to add a new song to the playlist, I switch back to "music library" and Banshee will now play any song from the entire library when the current song ends. This means that every time the song is about to end, I have to switch back to my current playlist so that banshee plays one of those songs, and then switch back to music library to find more songs to add to the playlist. Of course, the music library list is re-sorted and it doesn't remember where I was looking last time I visited it. *sigh*

There are other issues with it, but most of them are just bugs such as slow, unresponsive UI when switching between playlists and music library since it does a bunch of sorting/updating in the background. I've also noticed that it silently ignores files which has some weird characters (i.e. non UTF-8) in their name (it doesn't even warn or anything) plus it has a hard time with ID3-tags in non-UTF-8 encoding. And, since the entire design is based on the assumption that all songs has good metadata, this particular issue makes the bug extra annoying.

BMP (Beep Media Player) (Home)
This is the GTK+2.x port of XMMS and works pretty much exactly like Winamp 2.x. It's easy and doesn't even try to be smart and organize songs or anything (this is a good thing in this case :-) ). It will play any music file I throw at it, regardless of weird characters in the name and I can set it up to accept an additional charset for ID3-tags which is good, since I have some files with ISO-8859-1 encoded tags and/or names.

Since the player is skin based, it doesn't always behave well in terms of window management. Sometimes the main window can't be brought to focus, or in some cases it even disappears.

BMP is no longer in active development, but I'm looking with curiosity and hope at its next incarnation. Maybe it'll fit my needs?

iTunes (Home)
This is Apple's gift to the world in terms of software music players and has set the standard for lots of other music software (such as Banshee above). It's a pretty desent player, but only runs on Windows and OS X. It can fetch album cover from the web, but only from iTunes music store, and only if you have an account there. It's also not so good a finding the cover if one of the metadata fields are wrong (spelled wrong, or just slighly different - like "Foo soundtrack" instead of "Foo movie soundtrack"),

I'm still not convinced about the iTunes style interface for music management and it suffers from many of the limitations and frustrations I find in Banshee which is not completely unexpected. I don't agree that filtering is the same thing (or better) than searching. Filtering has it's place, but the good ol' just-move-selection-when-I-search functionality that is standard in all other types of apps is definately needed.



Winamp (Home)
This is probably the best of the worst on the Windows side. It scales from the simple "main window and a simple playlist" function of BMP/XMMS/Winamp2 but also has the media library to compete with WMP and iTunes. It's skinned, which I can't decide if it's a good or bad thing, but at least it works good enough for the few times I listen to music on Windows.

Windows Media Player (Home)
The default player in Windows, which I guess is pretty much the worst piece of music player software I've tried in my life. The UI is not only ugly, but it's completely unlogical. It behaves like no other application, and it's near to impossible to find the features or settings I need. It's good for one thing, and that's to play a single video file or audio cd opened from the explorer, but beyond that WMP is barely usable.

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I feel like a grumpy, unthankful user who probably should spend his time improving the existing free players instead of complaining like a child on a blog, but it sure feels good to get some of the frustration written down. Maybe I'll write a patch now or something... :-)