But not out of the box?
It seems to have a COM based scripting interface... Thats great while wrting power apps but quite an overkill while you're cobbling together a small one... Not something that would get me writing my own plugins.
Nope, since a plugin author has a huge database with all that info already available. i have not explored it much as i don't have much
music that uses lyrics.
You havent used Amarok have you?
What's the biggest size of library Amarok users say they have and how is the response to queries with large libraries ?
I'd expect upto 30k files should be fine with any free player, once it gets bigger thats where they have problems, the PC not being the bottleneck here.
No, I don't think Amarok does that; and wisely so. I would like all info I saved on to the tag fields to stay with the tracks(including embedding album art) so that when i transfer the files across to a portable or give them to a friend, they are not lost.
You can always save tags to files if you want to transfer or send to another person. However what's dawned on me is that its vital to ensure that your media is not corrupted. If you use checksums then you can't write back to the files as you have to re-generate those checksums again, not feasible.
Also backups become much faster as less is required during the sync, only new stuff gets transferred rather then existing, consequently defragging is also a lot quicker.
I have basic tags stored in the files but any extra meta-data is stored in the library only. This has an extra advantage of making the player very responsive especially if you are using external USB2 drives since you don't have to write back to the files, i dont have any external USBs, i get better performance already with internal drives using UDMA4 !.
Running library-only requires experience with the player you use, as if the library gets corrupted then you are sol. Fortunately its very easy to backup the library with MC, takes seconds so you can always roll back. The hard part is noticing corruption has taken place sveral days later and then having to roll back, but again a few tests make that easier. Over the years i've become more experienced with it and have run tags free for over a yr now.
Again, comparing a paid solution to a free and open source one is not something I would do but Amarok does satisfy all my expectation from a music player. Depends on how you want to use it maybe?
Why not, Browsers were pay only until M$ offered them for free. Firefox gave IE a lot of competition and is prolly largely responsible for Opera eventually being given out free, even tho they said they would never do it.
Not that MC will become free, if that were to happen i suspect jriver would be moving into a different line of
business.
Point is in this space where developments come out very quickly, the free solutions have a very tough time catching up but they ensure the pay-only players are always working to be ahead.
jriver indeed is powerful. But it is too complex and crams in too much functionality into one software to suit me. From the looks of it, Amarok seems to be similar to jriver (minus the eye candy).
Jriver's mC has been called a lot of things but i would not say eye-candy was one of them, there's much better with M$ Media center, until you try to do things with it and realise they haven't thought it through too well. There isn't cover flow a la iTunes or something like
this either, try using it with several hundred albums, becomes unwieldy quite soon.
Here's a free player that has aped MC's interface completely.
MC's roots & strength are in audio management, there isn't another tool that can beat it, they are also trying to allow pictures & movies to be managed..but this i think will mature maybe in the next version or 2. They are quite attentive to user requests and if its feasible you get things implemented immediately.
My ideal media player would have the following features -
1. Highly configurable cd ripping functionality.
2. Great tagging support.
3. A media library supporting multiple views based on user configurable tags as well as queries/ filters / expressions. It should support multiple artists, composers, lyricists etc.
4. Plenty of eye candy.
5. Configurable track rating system.
I would give QMP 2.00 (0.25 + 0.75 + 0.25 + 0.50 + 0.25) points based on the above. Wish there were a software that scored at least 4 on 5 and which were open source.
Everything you said is there today or can be implmented with custom tags with Jriver's MC, maybe not so much the eye-candy part, but i believe form should follow function rather than the other way around. One of the long time users was very seduced by MS media center for theater views but came back to ugly betty after a few months away.
Another of the users on the MC board has 350k+ files with lyrics and bios, he is finding it slow on a P4 3GHz & cpl of GBs of RAM and thinks he needs a faster PC. If you save all those lyrics & bios back to the fields then things are going to get slow, a much better method would be to save it to a txt file stored beside the audio files rather than in the database and have that displayed via visualizatoin plugins.
