Tonamel on 20/2/2006 at 10:42
And I ask that in the most honest of ways. I've spent the past couple hours looking for a new one, since WinAmp lacks certain functionality that I'd really like. And really, there's only two things I want to see:
1)(
http://del.icio.us/) del.icio.us style tagging.
I can see the first media player to implement this becoming very popular very quickly. The more recent concept of the "Smart Playlist" is sort of leaning in that direction, by letting me create playlists baseds on artist/trackname/length/whatever, but they lack the seemingly obvious feature of letting me name my own criteria.
How awesome would it be to just say "make a playlist with everything tagged 'relaxing'" or 'songfight' or 'hobbitmetal' or whatever you wanted? Very awesome.
2) Drag and drop from library to playlist and playlist to playlist.
I can't even fathom why this isn't the default for every player out there. And really, this could almost substitute for tagging, except it wouldn't prevent me from adding the same song to a playlist several times.
So Winamp is out.
I tried iTunes once. ONCE. (lol johnny dangerously'd)
(
http://www.mediamonkey.com/) MediaMonkey was surprisingly decent, despite their annoying logo. It has a ludicrously complicated classification tree that tries to harness the awesomeness of tagging with none of the ease of use. It even supports drag and drop. But it has a gargantuan interface, and when you switch to the smaller interface, it's just the playlist. I mean, not even the player. Just the list of songs. So, no clock, no 'random' or 'repeat' buttons, nothing but play/pause, stop and forward a backward. Not really that useful. I'm still considering it, though.
(
http://www.un4seen.com/) xmPlay was nice, if not that powerful. But it's portable, so there could be USB drive hijinks in the future.
(
http://www.songbirdnest.com/) Songbird supports drag and drop, and I might switch over to it when they get to a stable version (currently 0.1). It's based on Firefox, so I can see someone writing a tagging extension for it. And if that happens, I'll be set.
Everything else I saw was just... meh. It's really kind of disappointing that there aren't any media players that can't get some things right without getting other things horribly, horribly wrong.
So I guess I'm still with WinAmp, unless somebody has a better suggestion...
DarkViper on 20/2/2006 at 11:21
Quote Posted by Tonamel
How awesome would it be to just say "make a playlist with everything tagged 'relaxing'" or 'songfight' or 'hobbitmetal' or whatever you wanted? Very awesome.
Perhaps I'm not understanding what you want correctly, but I do this in Window Media Player (10):confused: You can create playlists that consist solely of whatever you put in a "Custom Field" and that can be whatever you want (Also Genre, Artist, etc.). I mean, hell... I have a custom field for my entire playlist
(eh, only 997 songs :erg: ) and I put certain descriptions in that custom playlist. Then I sort by those descriptions, and playlists are created. I also have a 2nd custom field always displaying, and it holds key lyrics to the songs, so I remember what they are. I mean, if you're saying there is no media player out there that does that.... and I thought if WMP did it then every player did it... then you're incorrect. Unless, of course, I didn't understand what you meant with the whole tagging thing.
I was under the impression that EVERY media player could sort by genre and if that's the case, why not just rename genres to "relaxing" or whatever tag you want. I mean, do you really pay attention to "genre" that much anyway? Who cares what other people say the song belongs to, just create your own description.
Andruha on 20/2/2006 at 11:22
Thanks for your mini-reviews. I am interested in this topic too, as I am always looking for a better media player.
IMO, iTunes perfectly fits the functionality of your perfect player. iTunes smart playlist can filter music like you describe in 1) and its playlists can be droped in other playlist as you wish in 2).
Therefore it is not clear why you dropped iTunes. You covered all Winamp alternatives but itunes. Is it a public knowledge that itunes to be avoided or do you have specific reasons?
BTW, DarkViper is right about tags.. The player does not care. You can put your own meaning in a tag (as long as you are consistent in using it). I regularly "repurpose" standard tags.
Shevers on 20/2/2006 at 11:32
Yeah, i've used WMP and iTunes, and I'm pretty sure you can at least do your first point in WMP and your 2nd in iTunes. You can probably do them both in iTunes :erg:
Uncia on 20/2/2006 at 11:53
Does iTunes save your position in a playlist yet? I have gargantuan playlists meant to be played for days, so having a 4000 song list restart at the first song every time the player is restarted is useless.
Tonamel on 20/2/2006 at 12:34
Quote Posted by Andruha
Therefore it is not clear why you dropped iTunes. You covered all Winamp alternatives but itunes. Is it a public knowledge that itunes to be avoided or do you have specific reasons?
No, I have personal issues with iTunes. Aside from it being a general resource hog (running unneccesary processes even when iTunes isn't open), I found the interface cumbersome, ugly, and unintuitive. Among other things.
Tagging is kind of an unfortunate term to have to use when discussing mp3s, as I'm not referring to ID3 tags. While I could repurpose the genre to 'relaxed' (and why should I have to?), it doesn't really help when I want to tag something with '1920 jazz male vocal neworleans aurgasm'* and then be able to search on any one of those terms and get that song returned. As I said, smart playlists are a step in the right direction, but they're still not flexible enough.
There are other features that I want, but didn't mention (queueing without reordering the playlist) as well as some issues that I ran into that I didn't bring up (Double clicking a playlist in MediaMonkey doesn't cause it to start playing? What?) Maybe I'm just picky, but I really think most media players have at least a couple major usability issues apiece.
*(
http://aurgasm.us/) aurgasm is an awesome music blog.
trevor the sheep on 20/2/2006 at 12:53
(
http://www.foobar2000.org/) Foobar2000? It's hella powerful if you fancy it, just look at what some people have done on the forum. I prefer to use it in its standard unintrusive form though.
Shakey-Lo on 20/2/2006 at 13:15
i use foobar, it is quite good. it also doesn't use up much resources so I can hav e it running in the background whilst playing games and not take an fps hit.
Andruha on 20/2/2006 at 14:25
Quote Posted by Tonamel
No, I have personal issues with iTunes. Aside from it being a general resource hog (running unneccesary processes even when iTunes isn't open), I found the interface cumbersome, ugly, and unintuitive. Among other things.
Well, personal preferences are important factors when choosing. Due to my personal preferences I do not use Windows Media Player. :cool: But these are subjective.
Quote:
Tagging is kind of an unfortunate term to have to use when discussing mp3s, as I'm not referring to ID3 tags. While I could repurpose the genre to 'relaxed' (and why should I have to?), it doesn't really help when I want to tag something with '1920 jazz male vocal neworleans aurgasm'* and then be able to search on any one of those terms and get that song returned. As I said, smart playlists are a step in the right direction, but they're still not flexible enough.
Next to ID3 tags, many advanced players use additional pre-defined meta terms (tags) to describe/query songs. It would have been ultimate flexibility if users were able to define custom tags and use them with player's query/filtering system. I don't know any such players.
In defense of iTunes, I use/repurpose 'grouping' and 'comments' tags if I want presicely define something as specific as '1920 jazz male vocal neworleans aurgasm'. Then smart playlists allow to query combinations of tags; each tag can be searched as single value or as a set of keywords. And yes, it means that I can search on any of the terms in your example and get that song returned (with others that fit criteria).
Rug Burn Junky on 20/2/2006 at 16:10
Quote Posted by Tonamel
As I said, smart playlists are a step in the right direction, but they're still
not flexible enough.
I think that's the key.
When the "smart" playlist only has one boolean operator [AND], it kind of makes for very weak options. Having parens and an OR (and maybe even a NOT) would be a step in the right direction.
iTunes itself is atrocious at mass tagging/renaming, which sort of exacerbates the situation, coupled with the limitations of the ID3 tags themselves (ie. multiple genre tags would be a good start). On top of which, the fact that everything it does ends up being a hobson's choice between manually telling it what to do on the one hand, or giving it, and it's ludicrously simplistic AI complete control on the other hand, is frustrating, to say the least.
I'm pretty much forced to use it, since nothing else works correctly with my ipod, but while it's simple and basic enough for the proles, it simply doesn't have near enough sophistication to be lauded.
Winamp is also lacking, since the drag and drop feature would be a huge upgrade, but that bothers me less, because I use winamp more for when I'm sitting at my PC, and generally listen to complete albums then, and have at least been satisfired with it's sorting capabilities in that regard.
