Why are all media players horrible?

Tonamel · Post by **Tonamel** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 4:49 am

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)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)

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.

xmPlay was nice, if not that powerful. But it's portable, so there could be USB drive hijinks in the future.

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...

Bjam · Post by **Bjam** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 7:52 am

Doesn't iTunes do both those things...? I know I have playlists for 'sleep' and playlists for 'dancing' and other things. For tagging you could just edit the info in the comments and it would all still show up when you typed 'relax' into the search.

Märk · Post by **Märk** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 7:44 pm

I remember back in the day, when we wanted to listen to a song, we had to take the LP out of it's sleeve, put it on the turntable, carefully set the stylus down...

You kids have it fucking *easy*, and yet you still complain.

Phil. Redmon. · Post by **Phil. Redmon.** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 7:56 pm

High Five.

sausage boy · Post by **sausage boy** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 9:54 pm

sleeve?
LP?
turntable?
stylus?

They DJing programs?

Tonamel · Post by **Tonamel** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 1:27 am

I have many other issues with iTunes, ranging from being a resource hog to the highly unintuitive interface. I was fighting it pretty much the entire time I was trying to use it.

And Sven, if by "take the LP out of it's sleeve, put it on the turntable, carefully set the stylus down... " you mean "take the CD out of the case, put it in the stereo and then carefully hit play," then that's what I've been doing most of today.

WeaselSlayer · Post by **WeaselSlayer** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 1:55 am

I got an ipod for christmas. I gave it back and got my turntable out and listened to the Stones and Lou Reed all day.

Mostess · Post by **Mostess** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 7:01 am

Sven wrote:... carefully set the stylus down...

Or, if you were like me, you performed the original "drag and drop".

I'm in agreement about players. iTunes has this bizzare need to copy and rename everything that it plays. MusicMatch and RealPlayer are basically nag/bloatware at this point. I used to like Sonique, but they built a new version that doesn't work.

[grump]And when will this whole "visualization" thing go away? Yes, yes, fluffy blobs of color pulsating by some linear transformation of a fft of the waveform. I get it. Humph. [/grump]

j$ · Post by j$ » Tue Feb 21, 2006 7:14 am

I'll tell you what I'd like - the ability to encode a jpeg into Media Player (which despite everything, I am fond of.) It would get rid of those annoying 'visualisations' and it appeals to my 'multi-media' soul. I am led to believe that i-tunes can do it, but I'm not having that particular bit of software slopping around my hard-drive just so I can indulge my artistic temperament.

Does anyone know of any other software / clever tircks that would let me do this? Maybe you can do it anyway in WMP but I think not ...

mkilly · Post by **mkilly** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 11:29 am

Mostess wrote:iTunes has this bizzare need to copy and rename everything that it plays.

edit -> preferences -> advanced tab -> general tab -> uncheck "keep iTunes music folder organized" and "copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library"

j$ wrote:I'll tell you what I'd like - the ability to encode a jpeg into Media Player[...] Maybe you can do it anyway in WMP but I think not ...

in the library, right-click a song (or group of songs) -> advanced tag editor -> pictures -> add -> define as cover (front) or whatever. in the now playing tab, right-click in the visualization area and select "album art," and then it'll display that.

QED.

Jim of Seattle · Post by **Jim of Seattle** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 1:30 pm

We all need one of these