Forever may not be long enough
For
years I have struggled to find a proper music player. Most players are too playlist- and metatag
oriented for my taste. My files are all stored in a nice directory hierarchy with proper
filenames. The tags are very incomplete and buggy (a lot my music file predate ID3 tag
standards, i8n is a disaster in most tags).
XMMS and winamp were pretty usable and fast (no meta-data reading in advance, but newer versions tried to do the same database building as other new programs (and failed)). One feature was particularly missing from these players: the ability to play random albums. This should (imho) be the standard setting of any music player: You are working and want to listen to an album in the background. Also it would be nice if you would be able to give a subset of your collection (for example all jazz music) and than the software picks an album for you in this genre. XMMS and winamp lack these features.
Even newer music players (banshee, amarok, rhythmbox, XMMS2, beep, windows media player, mpd, etc.) cannot do this, although they come closer nowadays. However I have lots of trouble trying them. For years they crashed on loading my large (100Gb+) collection. Now they usually do not crash anymore, but start crunching for hours (sometimes days) and when they finish loading the library and you restart the application; it just crunches again on their index for minutes. And more often than not, they load the index (sometimes 100MB+) to memory. This is intolerable if you just want to listen to one song.
I realized pretty quick that just whining is not going to help, so I wrote my own player in a few lines of Perl. It is far from perfect: I really want to:
- NOT start gconf-tool externally
- use gstreamer-perl bindings, instead of mplayer
- thread/fork so better key-bindings are possible
Despite these drawbacks I use it for months already and it works flawlessly . Therefore I release the script to the world. It sets your album cover in the background and just starts playing random directories (=albums in my library).