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.

My room mates insist that I have a “midas’ touch” that breaks all the technology that I fool about with. I prefer to consider myself unlucky.

Blackberry Media Player

Since I never leave home without my phone, I have recently tried to reduce the amount of crap that I carry around by using my Blackberry as a media player. It has a 4GB memory card in it, and Media Monkey (my jukebox software of choice) treats it just like a USB device that can be filled up with songs from my library.

Normally, after filling the card with music, I simply launch the media application and tell it to shuffle all songs. While it starts playing, the device scans for audio files in the background and fills up a database file of some sort with information gleaned from ID3 tags.

The problems started with a refurbished device that I picked up on a warranty replacement of my original (which mysteriously started to freeze up whenever I used the camera application) – now when I load the songs onto the device, the scanning process seems to find one or two of them, and just ignore the rest. Imagine my joy after leaving the house this morning for a day at work only to find that I had a grand total of two songs available for listening on my device.

My interim solution has been to tell Media Monkey to export an m3u of the playlist that it puts on the Berry to the device. Then I can just tell the device to shuffle that list instead of waiting for the scan that doesn’t work to complete before listening to some of my media. If that doesn’t work, I’ll likely source a different media player app for the device.

Windows Media Playback

Lately, whenever I play music files on my computer (regardless of format, bitrate, or player), they pop and click as if the volume is up too high and the machine is clipping it to compensate. Increasing the amount of buffer memory that Media Monkey keeps helped, as did turning down my levels to prevent clipping; but the noises are still present in the stream.

This one truly puzzles me, as it seems to have started out of the blue, and affects all audio on the system (but not video for some reason). Nothing at the driver or hardware level has changed in recent memory, and the problem spreads across all players, formats, and bitrates, so I don’t think it’s an issue with specific software or codecs.

I’ll keep banging my head against the wall until I figure it out and get back to head banging.

Last.FM Scrobbling

On a good note, I recently decided to try playing about with Last.fm after an official scrobbling plugin was released for Media Monkey. Wow. I cannot believe that I went for so long without using this incredible website, and as a music lover, suggest that anybody who collects music start using it immediately.

The plugin is seamlessly integrated with my player, and does all the heavy lifting in the background so that I don’t even have to worry about it or run a separate app, and the site itself is pretty much astounding.

Occasionally, my music collection feels stale – even though my standard playlist has about 2500 songs in it (as selected by rating), I sometimes get bored of it and go looking for something new. Previously, I accomplished this primarily by listening to Alan Cross, comparing notes with friends, and trolling amazon.ca and wikipedia pages for information about related bands and albums. Now, last.fm allows me to click the ‘related artists’ link from any artist page, or check out it’s suggestions for stuff that I should listen to.

Consider me a convert for life.