Rune: A local music player reviving Zune's classic aesthetic
github.com
github.com
I encourage anyone with a local music collection to go download Zune and give it a try.
Zune never took off because it came too late and was going against a market already dominated by the iPod, and Metro was hated since Microsoft shoved it down the throats of desktop users with Windows 8, even though it was wonderful to use on tablets, except Windows tablets of the time sucked major ballsack since they were powered by anemic Intel Atom CPUs trying to run a full desktop OS compared to the ARM iPads running a mobile OS.
When all the news and talks are about this iPod killer from Microsoft and then Apple themselves release a truly groundbreaking iPod killer themselves, you look foolish. Zune really got done in by marketing.
It was already the established player and the user base was already locked in with hundreds of $ in iTunes purchases. The usets weren't gonna throw that away no matter how much better Zune would have been.
iPod's market dominance wasn't in some UX magic that couldn't be replicated or braten by competitors, it was in the iTunes purchases that made it comfy to own specific songs and also locked users in.
This was the whole reason for creating Zune. Again, MS had licensed out their awful Windows Media products to 100 Chinese digital music player makers and got a fragmented market of trash, so MS jumped in to try and do it the right way themselves, but sadly too late.
I think the flat Metro UI evolved out of all the work we did coming out of the Windows Media division. I based all the flat design work I was doing for MS on British Sky TV's set top box graphics, simply because they were easiest for my developer brain to code and they also worked really well:
And then a couple of weeks after each demo we'd get a call from the labels and they would tip us off that Apple had come to show them something special that they were working on, and of course that meeting went a lot easier than ours...
(also every record label on Earth was using Macs not PCs, so Microsoft's software either had to be run on a laptop we took, or we had to show them Microsoft's absolutely awful Mac software. PG, bless him, gave me his personal iBook for testing (complete with all his passwords and AOL account), which he probably got from Jobs, but I was in a belligerent anti-Mac era so I shoved it in a closet with the button nailed down and stuck it on that "hold the button" game for two years)
Wasn't one of the big selling points that songs bought on iTunes were DRM-free?
(Sorry, I went to search and you are right: Apple went DRM-free only on 2009)
p.s. haven't Apple been sneaking DRM back onto their music lately? I know all the videos are DRM, right?
My argument was to have all-you-can-eat streaming subscriptions, but it was shot down, and at the time mobile data was pretty shitty (I built the original streaming service on a 9600bps GSM modem in 1999) so you could only stream at home.
Microsoft seem to just hack away, cutting in the dark and don’t bother to measure at all. ;-)
The Xbox was somewhat of an anomaly owing to exclusives like Halo and Gears of War, but it's floundering, and in some countries, like Japan, it's just never taken off, period.
Apple Vision doesn't seem to be a sensation in terms of sales figures, despite the HoloLens beating Apple to the punch, and the stereotypical nonsense being "Apple is always late, but they always do it right". HoloLens just got killed along with Windows Mixed Reality.
Hell, even the Microsoft Band beat the Apple Watch to market.
The problem is that merely having a presence in a niche doesn't guarantee success as it once did. Now, you need to actually iterate, innovate, and satisfy the minimum expected threshold of solving real problems. This is also what Tim Cook's Apple struggles with these days.
What's the killer app for Apple Vision? What was it for HoloLens?
When digital technology was new and exciting, having anything would draw buyers. Now, we're spoiled for choice, things move fast, it isn't years between models, it's months to a year. Early adopters tend to get a bad experience too.
We weren't making any money off of them and the 100% failure rate of Band 2 doomed the project.
Which sucked, customers loved us and we had features that still aren't matched by anything else on the market even today.
Many a familial glass of wine was raised to whoever you might have been whilst discussing how much we loved them!
https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/cooperative-multitas...
Microsoft is more towards licensing software to make money versus making a quality product top down.
That doesn’t happen often.
https://archive.org/details/zune-package_202204 https://archive.org/details/zunepackage_4.8.2345.0
It's also a fun way to check on what I was listening to back then. A little trip down memory lane.
Thanks to the awesome flutter_rust_bridge it’s very easy to use them together and leverage both their strengths.
That was the main reason I started my own music player project (https://github.com/albertz/music-player). But it never really got to the point to have a more advanced variant of this features. The best it could do is randomly play through directories, but at least prefer liked songs. I implemented the core playing engine in C++ and the remaining logic in Python, as I thought that would give me most flexibility. Unfortunately I haven't found the time to work on it since a while.
Reading your last commit, it seems like we had the similar idea of wanting more intelligent shuffle. Which is why I made a player that simply ingests plaintext playlists and then https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/mus/tree/75478f90269dca1b69e0d763d... to achieve what I wanted (though I'll probably modify it to avoid queuing albums sharing a primary genres; who wants 3 black metal LPs in a row?).
Here are some comparisons to MPD: https://github.com/albertz/music-player/blob/master/Compare_...
Btw, my music player can even act as a MPD backend.
Writing the backend part was anyway the simpler part. And that covered quite a lot of things: https://github.com/albertz/music-player/blob/master/WhatIsAM...
The GUI turned out to be the trickier part. I wanted to design everything around this infinite play list concept, and that in a cross-platform way, but I didn't really finished that.
Nevertheless, Rune might offer the features you're looking for. It not only provides recommendations based on individual tracks but also on criteria like "songs you've liked," "all music from a specific directory," or "all tracks from a particular album." Additionally, it can categorize recommended tracks into nine sub-lists based on acoustic features, helping you find the perfect arrangement.
Thanks to its separation of front-end and back-end, Rune can be used independently of a GUI. You can also use Rune's CLI to create M3U playlists. While these features haven't been fully refined due to my limited resources, I believe Rune has the potential to meet your expectations in the future.
Here are the document of the query syntax: https://github.com/Losses/rune/blob/master/documents/mix_que...
I hope that once Rune reaches a production-ready state, you'll remember it. I'll be looking forward to that day.
Ads are for people too lazy to install ad-blockers.
You mean "what have I done".
We’ve created one of the most amazing values and uses of technology of our lifetimes?
Streaming per month costs so much less than a new CD did 25-30 years ago. And it’s so so so much better than buying a new CD a month.
If the average person keeps paying the (quite small) bill, they can listen to essentially anything they want to listen to (unless they have very peculiar tastes — please do not reply to tell me that the obscure 1907 ragtime classic you need to listen to is not on Spotify).
It’s incredible!
Obvious point about not owning it either, so if an artist or whole label decides to have a fight with your streaming provider, sorry tough luck, you just lost them from your library.
I’ve never had this happen so far. What makes you think it’s likely to happen?
> If you're someone with a library of ~2k songs and that doesnt change in any real way for years on end it probably doesn't stack up as well
This assumes you work on the principle that you’ve found “enough” music vs. that you lost interest in investing in new music because of the cost of buying it.
The fact that it's already happened, and not once?
Google "recording label removed from spotify" for No.1 examples such as this:
"Spotify has removed Indian record label Zee Music Company’s catalog after negotiations for a renewal of their licensing agreement fell through. As a result, the No.1 track on Spotify in India over the past two weeks, “Apna Bana Le” from the soundtrack to the 2022 Hindi Examplesfilm Bhediya, is no longer available on the platform. "
You've either been lucky, or just havent noticed. Spotify used to be really bad for this, instead of it greying out in your library they used to remove every trace of it ever existing in your library, which massively sucked if it was an accidental or short term removal as it would never come back into your playlists.
Music is removed from streaming platforms all the time, it's not a rare thing, or a surprising one. As the other person said, google it and you'll see its a regular occurance.
> This assumes you work on the principle that you’ve found “enough” music vs. that you lost interest in investing in new music because of the cost of buying it.
(UK here so working on our pricing, convert as necessery)
Lets say you've bought/paid for your 2k songs. You put away the £10/month it costs for a streaming service. 6 months in you find a new artist, you want their album. You hop on ebay or wherever to buy a CD, you pay between £3 and £10 for their album (seriously you can get second hand CD's for even relatively new stuff on Ebay for a couple of quid).
In that 6 months you've put away £60 to spend on music, but have spent less than £10, and you own the copies. Nobody can take them away.
Streaming = convenience, thats really all you gain. But if you intend on having your music long term, it ends up being a massive cost.
10 years of Spotify costs £1200. If all you've listened to in that 10 year period is roughly the same few thousand songs thats a heck of a price to pay for conveinence, especially when that £1200 could've been turned into £2663.57 by sticking it in a managed account.
Honestly, the Spotify desktop client is also quite bad. Its feels very sluggish (I'm not sure about its detailed implementation, but it gives me the feeling of a web application). Maybe this level of experience is acceptable for a social media app, but as a music player, its quality is somewhat disappointing to me.
I’ve recently found myself experimenting with local playback and built https://github.com/xenodium/ready-player
While I used to stream music 100% of the time, that’s now more like 5%, dedicated exclusively to discovery.
These days, I’m now back to purchasing digital music and primarily local playback.
Also I'd like to know more about the interop between Dart/Rust and what the experience is like!
Rune has a built-in media analysis and recommendation system. It extracts dozens of acoustic features from audio, creating a high-dimensional space. Searching for nearby points in this space helps listeners find similar tracks, offering features akin to those on streaming platforms.
While creating a traditional audio player is an option, I wanted to explore something new. That's why I chose Rust for its performance and ecosystem advantages.
Regarding the inter-operation between Dart and Rust, I used a library called `rinf`. They communicate via protobuffer by sending signals to each other, and the experience has been quite smooth.
Short answer: No. It's purely a coincidence. Rune is an abbreviation for Zune Revived, and I only realized this awkward situation today.
Wondering about more power-user features (as someone who did quodlibet -> mpd -> cmus -> my own https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/mus) such as gapless playback, ReplayGain, album instead of track shuffle, IPC and event reporting, possible headless mode, integration with projectM, etc...