Plexamp, standalone music player that can play any music format
medium.com
medium.com
Ah yes, because when I want to play music, my first thought is, "doing it inside an entire web browser engine is the logical choice".
It's especially bad that they're comparing it to WinAmp. WinAmp was in part popular because it was extremely minimal and resource-light.
I'm so sick of electron apps. My battery hates them. My processor hates them. I hate them.
Maybe give cmus a try, which is almost the literal opposite of an electron app: https://cmus.github.io
And that’s why Plexamp is based on electron, as OSX and Windows support comes basically free.
To be clear I’m not dissing cmus, just that it’s not the same target as Plexamp and each choices make sense.
I mean, this basically seems to be a mpd client, so the difficult work has mostly been done already. But I guess a big draw of the webtechstack is that it's easier for a lot of people to do fancy animations (like the mentioned equalizer) and all the blinkenlights.
Which is interesting in the WinAmp context, as amongst the things that drew people to it were two things: Small size & fancy UI...
I remember there was a great Cambrian explosion of music players back in the Napster era, especially on Linux. It seemed to me that the availability of good non-pirate managed options like iTunes and later Spotify gradually killed off standalone players. Maybe they're coming back into fashion.
And yeah, I think there were three waves of sound apps on Linux: mp3s becoming commmon/computers fast enough (mid-90s), Amarok switching UIs and everyone writing a retro-replacement and recently music moving into the clouds, thus requiring players that connect to Spotify et al.
I guess the "small" only refers to the window size and not to the resource usage. Even the application bundle size is 160 megabytes. Holy fucking shit.
Electron doesn't even have any inclination to fix it: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/2003
They could even probably use Chromium Embedded Framework, which is usually ~40MB and get a decent improvement. The binary would only be 4x the necessary size rather than 10x then.
Next year I'm planning to rewrite iTunes as a personal project.
Essential features for me are:
- Multiple libraries
- Tags
- Playlists
- Playlist folders
- Sync
- AppleScript
- Mini player
I use iTunes as a general database manager, not only for music. I have a library for Facebook friends, where each person is stored as URL track. Clicking on the track triggers a PHP script, which opens my browser with their profile.
I also have other databases for Raspberry Pi projects, universities & departments, SMS text messages, and Chinese characters (a script on that library is what became https://pingtype.github.io ).
Before I start this huge project, could anyone tell me about alternatives? I've looked into FileMaker, Access, SQL, MongoDb, etc, but nothing has the ease of use, nested playlist folders, and scriptability of iTunes.
For what you're using it for, I'd probably using SQLite, and a mix of DB Browser for SQLite [1], which is kinda like Excel for SQL.
DB Browser can also export records to file. So if you had something like watch running on a folder, you can trigger a script as soon as that happens.
My vague thought process:
DB Browser entry:
kind entry play?
music KickassSongILike
A Python script, called by watch watching the db, sees the change and uses something like mp123 to play the file. When it's done, or rather when the process for mp123 stops, so you can stop a song playing, it changes play? back to 'n'.
But honestly, you'd do a lot better just building it as a GUI app from scratch.
Easiest would be Python, which comes with Tk for graphics, and SQLite for database. Probably a weekend to get you 3/4, and then... Well it depends on the hard parts.
The hard parts are:
* Sync. Sync with what? And how does that thing officially support extensions? Or what workarounds are currently used instead?
* AppleScript. AS doesn't get much love anymore, even from Apple. Integrating it isn't an easy thing.
As a way to explain how simple most of this is, I'll explain it in terms of SQL:
* Multiple libraries = Multiple tables.
* Tags = A second table, filled with tags, that you query via JOIN.
* Playlists = A second table that references primary keys of individual song records.
* Sync = Compare last-updated fields between backup db and current db, then using developer API to update your sync service.
DB Browser is like Excel. That's like seeing a single library playlist with lots of rows with songs on.
I need playlist folders, which is a kind of nested data structure. I can drag-and-drop playlists between playlist folders, and also make Smart Playlists.
Smart Playlists are basically SQL queries. But SQL databases are flat - I can't have tables inside tables.
Anecdotaly, tagging attributes and relationships on a large library is a good way to DIY big-ish data, as my HD learned.
My Facebook friends database is small by comparison (under 6000), but if I want to include all their Liked Pages, the database size increases to 223,783.
The nested structure is really important to me. For example, my friend David is in the lists: Taiwan, Christians, Health & Medicine, KGCC Church, KTL Christian student group.
The KGCC and KTL playlists are inside the Taiwan folder.
I can use Smart Playlists to sort by the year when I added friends, but I want to manually manage some playlists as well. For example, if I go on holiday to New Zealand and add a new friend, then they belong in the New Zealand list, not the Taiwan list, even though the date added is during my time living in Taiwan.
Some playlists are not in any country folder e.g. male/female, Limited Profile.
The highly nested nature of the database means Excel isn't suitable, and my brief look at SQL tells me that it would quickly become a mess of tables. There must be some kind of database program that supports nested structure, but I haven't found it yet, and that's why I'm asking here.
Nested structure is easy to represent in SQL, and doesn't take a lot of tables. It can be a little bit awkward to query, and it tends to be inefficient to query, but with a smallish DB of on the order of hundreds of thousands of records with a not really deeply nested structure, that's probably not a big concern in practice.
Graph Databases may be a better solution; they should handle the nesting more simply.
The internal data structure model looks fine, and probably quite efficient, but I can't find a GUI that shows playlist folders.
Same as parent, if anyone has a brilliant idea, I'm taking.
Edit: See http://www.opencypher.org
...
...
...
...
...
...
> We quickly settled on Electron
The reason Plexamp "can play any format" is that it's a client for mpd. While it's insanely bloated for what it does (Winamp became popular for exactly the opposite), it does look like a very good implementation of the concept visually. Especially satisfying when you always see very good music player concepts on dribbble, but none of them are actually implemented.
Absolutely stupid.
It's just plain stupid.
And they wanted the player to work on multiple platforms, unlike say Foobar2000.
Not saying it's the best technical choice, but given that it started as a personal side project it's a hardly fair to call it "plain stupid" to use Electron for this.
Given that both MPD and Electron has Linux support, PlexAmp will get it soon enough now that it has been released to a wider audience and hopefully gets more internal support.
You mean something like VLC, mplayer, clementine, Quod Libet, [insert another massive amount of players based on gtk, python, qt, etc.]? Something tells me Electron is not the only choice.
cool, it's ages I toyed with ncmpc and QMPDClient