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Comment by fph | Hacker News Reader

It feels like music players are becoming a thing for old geezers, like everything that requires you to have your data on a local disk. The 'modern' approach is just streaming everything off the net, no local storage required.

(I'm writing this as a disapproving old geezer, just in case it wasn't clear.)

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I must be an even older geezer, as I detest all the late wave music players that became full screen things that load music from everywhere.

I organize my mp3s into folders by genre, then named by artist - title. To play one I double click it from the system file browser, and just want a tiny, og winamp style player to open and play that one song. Or multi select for an instant playlist.

I do the same thing, and players (mostly on Android) that only support metadata-based browsing annoy me to no end. Like, just give a file browser so I can load a directory, for god's sake! It's much, much less effort than implementing a media library!

> Like, just give a file browser so I can load a directory, for god's sake! It's much, much less effort than implementing a media library!

I see you don't know the challenges of disk access on Android for developers.

I've been using Music Folder Player (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.zorillasoft...) for over a decade for this very reason.

I think Android has now made this type of player almost obsolete. Every app has its own file sandbox and apps must go through an abstraction for media that works poorly.

I use Foldplay

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.pnhdroid.f...

I've never found a playlist editor better than Winamp. Open a folder tree of all of my music and I could quickly enqueue an hour of exactly what I wanted to hear and if that changed, swap in a few tracks, or an entire album or act from a folder. It took a long time to build up my library and I knew it very, very well.

Does that mean you need to click on the next song to play ever ~3m ? Because that sounds worse than having to flip the vinyl every ~5 songs.

It depends. In short, in that workflow, yes. But that's normally because I'll think of a song or get one stuck in my head I want to hear, as I don't listen to music all day.

You can also multiselect files or folders to open as a playlist, if that's your thing.

Infinite autoplay of stupid recommendations is so annoying too.

Well I'm almost 50 and ripped my first (shit quality) 64kbps mp3 somewhere around 1998 or earlier. But I switched to a library view and stopped individually managing folders when iTunes first appeared (24 years ago?). I just concentrated on proper tagging, including mood and instrument. I spent that more time ripping CDs and using tag editors than worrying which folder they were in (but that took care of itself with good tags). With a library you can still play an album, or a whole artist catalog, but also a whole genre, a mood, all you top rated music, or an automatic playlist that plays your least recently played, or least played but highly rated music from a mood, instrument, genre etc etc.

These days I use musicbee which has extremely customizable views, so you can browse your music however you want. My wife tends to pick a specific album, whereas I tend to be in a specific music mood so I hunt around for tracks and make a two hour playlist for it. She'd be happy with folders probably but it would kill me not to be able to search for instruments and moods. How else are you going to get a trumpet and piano playlist? Remember every song name?

> Remember every song name?

I know it's crazy, but yes! Nothing drives me crazier than seeing an actor and trying to remember where I saw him/her in before, and hearing a song I know but don't know the name.

I use Shazam liberally but it's pretty bad at the non mainstream stuff. I end up finding it with searches and screenshotting it for my reference.

Not that you asked any of this, but I -have- to know the name of a song I like.

You don't need to always listen to new pieces of music to enjoy music. Once you realize that you can focus on owning the stuff you like and listen to that most of the time

Plexamp is a good player for your local files (personal server) that you can stream.

I use it and it's mostly great, but the experience on Linux desktop isn't the best as it feels like primarily a mobile app.

There's a large and growing number of music players for streaming from your own server. You get the best of both worlds by owning your music and having it accessible anywhere.

They are all so poorly written though.

None of the OSS media players come even remotely close to the UX of Spotify, and that's speaking as someone who has paid way too much for Roon because it's at least 80% of the way there.

I've really been liking plexamp on my phone & desktop. It's not perfect & I've recently swapped to just using an iPod but it was good while I was using it.

Evermusic https://apps.apple.com/us/app/evermusic-cloud-music-player/i... is pretty solid.

UX of Spotify - you mean annoying podcasts, ads for the concerts by the bands you've never heard of and mixes with ghost artists?

My main issue with Spotify is how bloated it is, how they ruin the UX with almost every update.

eh, for the masses yes but it depends on what people u surround urself with.

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