Manifesto for a Better Music Player
No perfect music player exists yet.
Apart from your grandma and deaf people, few people do not use computers to play music. It has become part of the digital experience to listen to music while surfing/chatting/coding/gaming. And yet, if you ask people, most of those who care the least bit about the usability of the programs they use will agree that no music player is perfect.
Windows users will curse in frustration about the unwanted bloat of Winamp 5 or the pathetic hegemony of the lesser “default” player, Windows Media Player. MacOS X users will point at iTunes with great pride, only to confess that its monolithic perfection is actually spoiled by loads of frustrating details. Unix users will gladly demonstrate their contempt over the most popular player, XMMS, a convenient but over-simplistic clone of the Winamp 2.* series. There exist alternative players, but for the sake of argumentative generalisation, let’s wrap it up this way: they all suck, in some way.
Maybe your 12-year-old sister does not languish for a better, more powerful music player. Maybe you don’t care about it either (in which case, it is time to close this tab and go back reading the best page in the universe). But if you think music players could use some improvement, read on.
In this article, we will go through the history of music players, which will be split in three categories: the old playlist-based players (e.g. XMMS, early Winamp versions), the present media-library-based players (e.g. iTunes, Rhythmbox, Winamp 5) and the alternative client/server-based players (e.g. Music Player Daemon, XMMS2). Studying this evolution and analysing the features of each generation should help us identify the flaws of current music players and design concepts that will bring music playing to a new level.