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There are many music players available, but I have yet to find one which fits the way I like to listen to my music. Some players can do some of these things, but none get it quite right. My ideal player would be able to do the following:
1) The default behaviour should be to play all tracks, randomly.
I should be able to tell it to skip to the next random track, if I don't want to listen to the one it has selected.
2) At any point I should be able to select a specific track to play, in an easy tree of Artist/Album/Track. I should be able to tell it to either start playing right now, or to play next (after the current track finishes).
3) While playing any track, I should be able to easily (one or two clicks max) instruct the player to play or queue to play next the next track in track order on the album, or all the remaining tracks on the album, or just play the entire album from the start (in track order). I haven't been able to find a player that can do this. Of course, if I later decide not to play the rest of the album, it should be easy to return to random play.
4) Importantly, and this is another bit I haven't been able to find yet, the player should then continue playing randomly selected tracks after it has finished playing the specific track or tracks I selected.
5) It should be possible at any time to restrict the tracks played to a specific artist or artists, or equally to just exclude specific artists from being played. This should be able to be done either as a button for the currently playing track's artist, or by typing in /searching for an artist. Again, this should be easily cancellable to return to the default Full Random state.
6) It should be possible to configure the player to display in at least two different modes. One is "as small as possible", while still retaining essential information and controls. Windows Media Player does this well when it puts itself into the task pane, although it does miss one essential bit of information, which is an indication of track position (time elapsed/remaining). Although I believe in version 10 they have addressed this. This mode is for when I am listening to music while working on the PC.
The second mode is "BIG". This is Big text (at least 72pt, but should be configurable), displaying Artist, Album and Track name, a big image of the album cover (if available). This is so it can be seen from across the room, when listening to music and not working on the PC.
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I think Winamp does most of this stuff |
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Pretty sure it doesn't, or at least I couldn't make it do it. Not without manually telling it every step (for example turning shuffle off, clicking on the album to play, then when it finishes, turning shuffle back on and telling it to play All Music). The idea is that it handles all of this automatically, for absolute minimum interaction needed. |
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I think that's called a "radio." |
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OK, if you prefer, a radio in which I can instruct it to play the rest of the songs off an album in track order, then continue playing random tracks as normal. |
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It comes down to the same thing, in that players or radios are set up to either play a random selection, or to play specifically chosen music, but not to be able to choose music to play then have it continue with random music after playing the chosen stuff. |
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Could you do this using a playlist that you edit on the fly? The only downside is that the randomness of the tracks would be decided at the beginning, and you would run the risk of seeing what was coming up next. |
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On finding a track that reminds you to listen to the rest of the album, a right-click search for the album matching the currently played tune could list the rest of the album's tracks - which you could then insert into the playlist after the current track. |
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That's not too many clicks, but it would be nice to have a single-button - play till end of album feature. What I'd like is to be able to build up by own behavious in some kind of macro-language so I can define my own behaviours - so that playlists would be based on dynamic search-functions (like the one described above) rather than static-pre-built affairs. |
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[marked–for–deletion] WIBNI |
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This is not a WIBNI, it's a shopping list of user interface tweaks. Do we want to exclude that kind of thing from the site? |
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No. If well conceived, thoughts about UI improvement are quite worthwhile, if rare. |
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