Reinventing the Wheel: A Better Media Player

As I’ve posted in the past, I am a picky media player user. I’ve tried most every free player under the sun, along with some not so free solutions and have yet to be entirely satisfied with any of the available products. To that end, I’ve started to think about the possibility of writing my own media player. The following are some of the considerations that I’ve been mulling over:

Base Requirements:

• Playback of both mp3 and flac files. Support for other formats could be added as required by me or other users, possibly with us of some sort of plugin engine.
• Some kind of a rating system, preferably with a high level of granularity. I’m not married to the standard 5-stars idea, and may explore alternative ideas, including tagging.
• Truly smart playlists that allow for the standard global AND/OR rules, as well as more advanced expressions that support brackets and branching logic.
• Smart importing from existing iTunes, Songbird, Media Monkey, and Windows Media Player libraries, various playlist formats, and other types of media collections.

Feature Wish List:

• Blackberry Sync: When not at home, I listen to music from a flash card on my Blackberry Curve. The device can be filled with media by simply dumping it all on the media card, which appears as a removable drive. As previously mentioned, I listen to a mix of mp3 files and lossless flac files. When dumping these files to the Blackberry, I would like to see one thread dedicated to converting the flac files to mp3s, while another thread actually fills the device, resulting in a sync process that is not significantly slowed by media conversions. Additionally, since I have hard drive space to spare, I would like to cache some or all of the resulting mp3 files so that they don’t have to be converted again on the next sync. I would also like to see the ability to import files from the Blackberry to the library so that I could pick up media on the go and bring it home with me.
• Library Export/Backup: With a library of 10K+ tagged and rated songs, losing the library of meta data about my music would be a traumatic experience indeed. To solve my paranoia over losing this data, I would like to implement the export of single playlists and entire libraries to all of the major playlist formats, as well as to a structured XML document, similar to the one that iTunes maintains. Some kind of automated backup feature like the one that iTunes has would also be nice.
• Online Integration: I currently report all of my song plays to last.fm, which is an excellent resource for discovering new music. I would like my media player to link in with last.fm and other online resources, but am also open to developing my own online resource that lets users to easily compare and organize their collections, correct their meta data, and actively discover new music that other users have rated.
• Library Sharing/Streaming: We run a large network with lots of computers, and I’d like the ability to listen to my music from anywhere in the house. I really like the work that Subsonic has done in this area, and hope to implement some or all of it’s features, while at the same time linking it into my database so that I can see my playlists and edit my meta data from anywhere in the house, and indeed, from anywhere in the world.
• Cross-Platform and Open-Sourced: Given all of my recent experience with Debian Linux, I’d like to see my media platform running on both Windows and Linux. This one might take me awhile to accomplish, but is definitely a goal of mine, given that I am now a confirmed Linux user who still keeps a couple of Windows platforms lying around.

Implementation:

Of course, with all of these goals in mind, the next step is to consider which platform I’d like to build on. This basically comes down to a number of choices, some cross-platform, some not:

• Visual Studio .NET: My development IDE of choice, Visual Studio provides extremely quick GUI creation and a great number of useful libraries that cut out a lot of the nitty gritty time consuming base code necessary for a project as large as a media player. Additionally, the Windows Media Player control allows for drop-in playback of media, and I have a ton of example code lying around that implements most of the features listed above. Unfortunately, while .NET 2.0 is supported on Linux under the Mono platform, I don’t know how far that support goes in terms of media management and playback.
• SFML: The Simple Fast Media Library is available as libraries that are pre-compiled to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac, with support for Visual Studio, C/C++, Python, and Ruby. It includes packages for windowing, graphics, networking, and most importantly, audio capture and playback. This is a definite contender as it is open source, meaning that I could build the libraries directly into my code, and simply recompile for different platforms. Of course, the downside is that I’ll have to code in C++, and without any kind of graphical interface builder.
• Juce: Jules Utility Class Extensions is like a more featured version of SFML that provides packages for just about every conceivable task, including some serious audio libraries that support all kinds of playback, effects, and hardware accelerated features. In addition, it does audio CD reading and writing out of the box on Mac and PC platforms. If I were to strike out from Visual Studio, this would probably be my library of choice, as it can do nearly everything that VS can do, but is fully open sourced and supported on just about every available platform.
• Java: I have no idea how realistic this idea is. I do know that in the past, I’ve created Java apps that can play both wav and mp3 files, and stream those files over a network connection. That said, as much as I enjoy coding in Java, it is widely regarded as being slow and clunky – not exactly traits that I’d like associated with a media player that will be running all day. On the other hand, Java is not C/C++ (a huge bonus as far as I’m concerned), is fully object oriented, has decent audio support, and makes networking extremely easy. That said, programming GUI’s of any kind of complexity in Java is not a task to be taken on lightly.

Well, that about sums it up. This project is definitely something that I intend to undertake in the coming months, and until then, I’ll keep thinking about my requirements and what library I’d like to use to implement it. If anybody else has experience with some useful audio libraries that they’d like to share, please do so in the comments.

The Return of the iTunes to Zune Playlist Converter

Hey all,

After a couple of irate posts regarding the failure of my old iTunes to Zune playlist converter tool to work with newer versions of the iTunes and Zune playlist formats, I’ve rebuilt the project from the ground up and re-branded it as yourTunes. You can find the support page here, where downloads and tutorials can be found, and you are welcomed to leave some feedback.

This first version is a rebuild and incremental improvement on the old project, but plenty of cool features are planned for future releases, so keep on top of it!

Cheers, Jon

Which Music Jukebox Software is Best for You?

I listen to a whole lot of music. There are really no two ways about it; if I’m at home, music is playing on my computer. If I’m not, it’s playing on one of the myriad of portable devices I own. I maintain a music library with just over ten thousand songs spanning most every genre and year in the last half-century. This of course means that I need to run some mean music organization software.

Like most other iPod owners, my default player is Apple’s iTunes, but lately it just hasn’t been impressing me as much as it used to, as evidenced by this long list of complaints:

• Regular memory usage is around 130MB, and that number balloons to well over 250MB if I dare open that new-fangled glossy cover flow feature.
• To make matters worse, if I close the cover flow, usage drops almost immediately to around 180MB, but refuses to dip lower, making me suspect a memory leak.
• I keep the application running 24 hours a day and after about a week of uptime, its footprint can often climb above 300MB (without coverflow), lending more evidence to the memory leak theory.
• As I type this, iTunes is converting some WMA tracks to MP3 while playing music, and is sipping 78% of my 2GHz dual core processor. That’s inexcusable.
• Smart playlists are dumb at best, allowing only a global AND or a global OR for all playlist conditions. Sometimes this just doesn’t cut it, and I find myself chaining two or more playlists or using De Morgan’s law just to figure out the boolean logic behind a desired set of conditions. Yeah, I’m that much of a nerd.
• The iTunes store peddles DRM-laden garbage. Sure, they sell iTunes Plus tracks now, but those are still m4a files (while the rest of the world sells MP3), and most big-label releases are still protected by FairPlay DRM.
• When importing a folder full of songs, it often creates two copies of each track in my library and on my file system. Except that sometimes I get two copies of only some of the tracks, while the others copy as normal…
• If a friend who runs a Mac brings his iPod over, I can’t plug that iPod in and stream tracks off of it because it’s Mac formatted. Sure, Windows doesn’t know the format of that hard drive, but Apple does; couldn’t they write a driver layer that can read it? I’ll bet that they could.
• iPod cables are expensive. What are all of those damned pins used for? My blackberry is a mobile computer and it syncs just fine with a USB cable. Every device on the market uses the USB standard, while Apple sticks to this ridiculous cable with at least 30 pins on it, forcing third party manufacturers to license the design and jacking up accessory cost as a result (ok, this is really an iPod complaint, sue me).
• Lastly, when editing information for multiple tracks, like for an entire album at once, the application doesn’t save my changes to the id3 tags. Yet if i modify the info on each track separately, it does. What gives, Steve?

Overall, considering the long list of features that iTunes does provide, it’s certainly not the worst program ever written, but I can’t help but think that the Windows versions an after thought in Cupertino and that they just don’t get as much polish as the Mac versions of the program. Long story short, I recently went looking for alternatives. The shortlist of what I require from a jukebox application:

• Easy to navigate interface that lets me search, organize, and find my music with ease
• Track ratings. This is a must when your library has more breadth than the weekly Top 40 list.
• Smart and Static playlists that let me automatically partition my music into logical subsets
• Equalizers are nice, but should come with some presets that i can tweak to my setup.
• Low memory footprint with no leaks – I run this app all day long, so make it efficient
• Automatic file system organization so that I don’t have to worry about it.
• Search by track name, artist, album, etc.
• CD burning and ripping is a nice extra, but I can use a third-party app with no complaints if necessary
• XML file importing so that I can migrate my giant library from my existing solution is a must. Honestly, I’ve written a number of simple apps that parse an exported iTunes library (see the sidebar); This is a dead simple feature to add.

And so with the help of the SomethingAwful SHSC community, I’ve installed and played with a number of media players over the last couple of days.

1. Songbird: Perhaps the most full-featured iTunes clone that I’ve ever seen, this app has some serious promise as an iTunes replacement. Memory usage is similar to that of iTunes, but is a little more stable, and doesn’t seem to leak so bad. The interface is fully customizable and skinnable, and it imported my iTunes library in about 5 minutes. Unfortunately, it lacks an equalizer, CD burning or ripping, and has the same poor smart playlist support that iTunes does. I get the feeling that I haven’t even scratched the surface of this players’ feature set, not to mention the hundreds of plugins that you can add from inside the program. Built on the the same XLU framework as Firefox, it’s generally stable, has a tabbed interface, an in-app web browser, and links to SHOUTcast, lastFM, and a ton of other web services. While it’s not quite there yet, I’ll be keeping a close eye on future releases.
2. Zune: Over the summer, I participated in a Zune marketing program and received a free device in return for reviewing it and the player software. My full reviews can be found over at the Bus Error weblog if you’re interested. The basic story goes like this: Track ratings are either “i like it,” “i hate it,” or “not rated,” which doesn’t provide enough resolution for a large library. The interface is pretty and an interesting departure from iTunes’, but the Zune Marketplace and Social are seriously hampered at best in Canada, which is a shame because I’d probably buy a Zune pass and use this thing to discover new music otherwise. Lastly, when filling the Zune from a smart playlist, there’s no way to limit the number of songs in the playlist by size, so if your library is larger than your Zune capacity, it’s a guessing game. The popular iTunes to Zune playlist converter utility (available in the sidebar) was a project of mine written to address the fact that the Zune is an amazing device with crappy software behind it. Unfortunately iTunes is way ahead of the Zune Jukebox, even though Zune brings some great new ideas to the table.
3. foobar2000: For what it does, this program is simply amazing. It plays music with my entire library loaded in just under 35MB of memory, and has more customizable features than you could reasonably count. Unfortunately, it lacks ratings and smart playlists (at least i think so – there are a bunch of playlist options that I just don’t understand), and is about as easy to use as reading a novel printed in binary is to read. This app does everything, but for anything more than playing specific songs, albums, or artists, it requires a bunch of reading to learn about. I’m sure that if I spent a week or two learning the ins and outs, I could get the hang of it, but this player is most certainly not for the consumer marketplace – it’s for people who don’t mind taking time to configure it properly and don’t want high level abstraction from the file system.
4. Media Monkey: One of the only Media Players that I’ve heard of that still offers a paid option. I suppose when you don’t have a store and you’re not open sourced, you have to make money somehow. The free version has a good feature set, and a lifetime license is worth $20, considering the extra features that are enabled with it. On first launch, it took about 10 minutes to index my music folder, detected that I had iTunes installed, and imported all of the library data from it. Unfortunately, this last step took forever, although I could listen to all of my music in the mean time – it just isn’t all tagged properly. At first glance, this appears to be the best jukebox software ever written. It sorts by just about any criteria you could wish for without making playlists, automatically pulls track information from amazon or wikipedia, has podcast, SHOUTcast, and ICEcast, and a web browser built in, and has a direct link to purchase any track in your library from the Amazon store. As of yet, this is by far the most impressive media player that I’ve ever encountered. I will be purchasing the full license and temporarily adopting it as my main jukebox. Expect to hear more about this app in the future.

So there you have it. As per usual, Apple is shiny and simple but doesn’t necessarily include every feature that one could want. Microsoft brings a strong contender to the table, but fails to pull ahead in the race, likely until they throw a few more billion dollars at it. The open sourced Songbird looks promising, but as with most open sourced projects, will need to hit version two before it’s viable for the mass marketplace, and foobar2000, while an example of impressive programming, is so stripped down and customizable that it would confound the average user. Kind of like Linux. Ok, that wasn’t really a fair jab. For now, I’m going to be playing with Media Monkey, and I’ll share my experiences when I’ve thoroughly explored its feature set.

Which player is best for you? If you’re not a computer enthusiast, and don’t feel like paying $20 for a media player, I’d go with iTunes. It’s simple, intuitive, and provides every feature that the average user expects. If you don’t like rating your music, or have a collection of less than 100 songs, check out the Zune player – it’s a neat twist on iTunes, even if it’s not that great for large collections yet. Songbird is most certainly an app to keep in mind, and will probably become a possible iTunes killer as it approaches maturity. Meanwhile, if you want an eye opening experience that will show you how a media player ought to work, look into Media Monkey. It really is cool.

Cheers,

Jon

Edit: As pointed out by my colleague Jake Billo in the comments of this post, some of what I wrote about iTunes in this post was 100% made up and totally incorrect. Not that I was intending to lie about it, but some of my thoughts regarding iTunes were misconceptions. For the record, if you haven’t yet challenged your membership to the cult of Steve, you should still try to do so – there are alternatives out there. And yes, the grass is greener on the other side.

Post-Midterms Class Roundup

So midterms are finished, and life goes on. As much as I’d love this post to be tech-oriented, showcasing some brilliant new software that I’ve written in my spare time, the truth is, I haven’t had enough spare time lately in which to write any software of value.

The small exception to that claim is this app, a neat little VB and XML oriented program that allows you to read an iTunes playlist file (as exported to XML), and auto-copy all of the songs in that playlist to any folder you wish, preserving the artist/album/song file structure.

I wrote the program to fill my brand new blackberry with a selection of excellent songs, because the built in Roxio media manager is great for pictures, but slow as sin when it comes to larger media files. After writing it, I realized that it could also be a useful piracy tool; but then again, a hammer could be a positively fantastic homicide tool in the wrong hands too. Of all the libraries I’ve ever written, my .NET XML parser has spawned off more crappy little programs, making it possibly the most useful bit of code I’ve created.

Other than that, my coding has lately been limited to some cool graphics stuff in with OpenGL and C++. So far we’ve constructed a classic spinning cube implementation, complete with a custom view pipeline that implements transformations, dynamic shading, and back face culling in software. The next topic that we’re studying is texturing, and eventually, ray tracing and shaders.

While none of my assignments for this course have been interesting enough to warrant posting, I’ll definetly up my final project for the course, which at this point, is probably going to be a 3D terrain generator, similar to that of Sim City 4 fame.

The Canadian DMCA and You

With the October 14th Canadian federal election quickly approaching, I think it’s a good time to bring forth an important issue that isn’t getting enough spotlight in our media.

Anybody who is tech-oriented or reads the news should be familiar with the American DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). Put into law in October of 1998, the law works to strengthen copyright protection in the USA, and includes an anti-circumvention clause that makes it illegal to break any digital security system placed on your files. This law applies to any kind of Digital Rights Management (DRM) system placed on your otherwise legitimately purchased digital property.

Under the DMCA, it is illegal to convert Apple iTunes downloads to the more open Mp3 format, rip DVD movies to your computer to watch them on a network, a portable device, or otherwise back them up, rip certain CD’s (the ones that have copy protection warnings all over them) so that you can listen to them on your iPod, and a whole host of other should-be legitimate activities.

In the past, copyright law was only broken if you took somebody else’s work and illegally distributed it to others via the internet, a CD-R, or USB thumbdrive. With the DMCA in place however, it is illegal to do all sorts previously legal activities that fall under the realm of fair use of a product legitimately purchased.

Which brings me to my point – previous to taking their summer recess, Stephen Harper’s minority conservative government was once again attempting to champion bill C-61 through the House of Commons in an effort to put a similar law into effect here in Canada. Most experts in the United States argue that their DMCA has actually hindered the tech sector there, while security experts cringe at the idea of being legally bound to not test the security of various systems, including electronic election equipment (on which maker Diebold has handily installed DRM so that it is illegal to check over their source code).

As a tech-oriented citizen entrepreneur in Canada, I feel that this law needs to be struck down immediately. Details regarding the law can be found here, while information about how to help defeat the proposal can be found at boingboing, copyrightforcanadians, this youtube video from Canadian law proffessor Michael Geist, and this segment of CBC’s the Hour, also featuring Michael Geist.

For those seeking more information regarding DRM, the DMCA, and the effect both have had on tech and liberty in the USA, check out this essay (*.pdf) that I wrote last term for an Ethics course I took at Laurier. It’s about 16 pages, but a solid read, and full of links to other important resources.

Contact your local MP, and get their opinion on the law as part of your voting research.

Cheers,

Jon

No, Zune does Not support iTunes Libraries

This post by Matt Rosoff over at the CNet Digital Noise blog was brought to my attention by a colleague today. It is a response to an earlier NY Times article by Saul Hansell that forwards the hypothesis that iPod to Zune converts are scarce because most users have so much data inputted into iTunes that moving to new jukebox software requires a substantial commitment of time and effort.

The CNet article responds to this hypothesis by claiming that the Zune jukebox software can, in fact, support existing iTunes libraries. The author points out that the Zune software plays AAC files (the native ripping format for iTunes), and that it scans the default iTunes music directory for files on startup.

Unfortunately, what he fails to realize is that these actions do not in and of themselves constitute support of the iTunes library format. Real support would be an XML reader that allowed users to actually import their libraries – including all meta data, album art, playlists, and ratings – into the Zune jukebox software.

Songbird (an open source media player that supports plugins, and looks as though it will be very interesting come v1.0) does provide such a feature (as an optional plugin), that works extremely well. It is also rumoured to support Zune players, and will likely be my new media player of choice if they get smart playlists implemented any time soon.

Instead, Rosoff claims that the lack of converts between players is due to a lack of compelling Zune features, and overall customer satisfaction with the iPod product. While these claims may in fact be true, his argument about Zune support for iTunes libraries is downright false. Hansell, on the other hand has it right with this statement:

But now many iPods are replacements by people who already have substantial music collections in iTunes. For those people, the choice is between buying an iPod that will simply work with all their music or investing the time and effort to try to convert everything into Zune’s formats.

Where the term ‘formats’ is not referring only to the physical format of music files on the Users’ machine, but also to the internal database format that their library is kept in within their jukebox software. As a user of both players, I fall into this category – my library contains well over 8K songs, most of which are properly tagged, rated, and organized into playlists. While the Zune jukebox did indeed recognize, import, and find correct meta data for most of my files, it did not retain their ratings, number of plays, number of skips, or any of the other handy errata that iTunes assembles for every file in its library, or any of my playlists.

In my own opinion, the reason that the Zune has yet to dent the iPod monopoly is due mostly to the fact that it is roughly the same price as the iPod, and its two features that could very well kill the iPod require a snowball effect of users to make a dent.

I’m talking about the wireless music and photo sharing, and the much-hyped Zune social. Wireless sharing is basically a non-feature here in Canada, as I can only think of two other people that I know who have Zunes, and have never found one while using the Zune in public. The Zune social suffers from the same lack of users, as well as crippled functionality outside of the Continential USA.

That said, if these features were to gain enough users that it became commonplace for everybody to know at least one friend who owned a Zune, well then Microsoft might have an iPod killer on their hands. Until then, it is just as Hansell says – Microsoft is still waiting for the Zune Generation.

Edit: The latest release candidate of Songbird supports smart playlists (that are almost identical to the feature in iTunes), but has yet to implement Zune support. Being open source however, it’s just a matter of time. Check this page out for more info on new Songbird features.

iTunes to Zune Playlist Converter

This handy application converts iTunes playlists to Zune jukebox playlists. I wrote it out of frustration with the Zune jukebox auto-playlist feature, and it has served me well so far. The project is still in development, so if you have any suggestions on how to improve it, please leave a comment.

Download the Program

The program is pretty simple to use. Just follow these handy steps:

1. Download the zip file and unzip it to a directory of your choice
2. Open iTunes and close the Zune jukebox software
3. Right click on the playlist that you wish to export and select ‘Export Song List…’ from the context menu
4. Choose where you’d like to save the playlist, and ensure that ‘Save as Type’ is set to *.xml
5. Launch the ‘iTunes to Zune Playlist Converter.exe’ application from the unzip directory
6. Use the browse button to load the saved *.xml file into the ‘iTunes Playlist File (XML)’ field
7. Use the browse button to choose where you’d like to save the converted Zune Playlist file. Note that for the Zune player to recognize the new playlist, it must be saved to C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\My Music\Zune\Playlists\ on Windows XP, or C:\Users\UserName\Music\Zune\Playlists on Windows Vista.
8. Click the ‘Convert’ button, and wait for the success message box to pop up.
9. Launch the Zune jukebox software and go into the ‘Playlists’ view. You should see your newly created playlist in the pane to the left. Note that it might take a second to recognize the playlist, and another minute or two after that until the list is playable, depending on the size of the list. This is because the Zune software has to sift through the playlist and link each referenced file to one in its current library before the list can be used.

It is important to remember that this only works if the iTunes library and the Zune library in question are drawing from the same media files. This means that you should have the Zune jukebox software set to monitor the iTunes music folder that you are drawing from, so that the same files are referenced in both programs’ libraries.

Cheers,

Jon

Originally posted at jakebillo.com