This is a repost from the article published in LWN and mentioned earlier on this blog. Thanks to LWN for publishing it in the first place, and to all the people who proofread and commented on it! I hope this will serve as a more up-to-date introduction to Collections in XMMS2 (I should probably post it on the wiki). Discussion is welcome, naturally.
The number of music players on Linux has been steadily increasing lately, but while these projects have been getting more and more polished, we have yet to see revolutionary improvements in terms of user experience. Indeed, the trend has privileged borrowing as many features as possible from other projects, rather than questioning the reasons behind their design.
This article describes XMMS2’s attempt to address long-standing limitations of music players, through its new support for Collections. First, I will summarize the rationale behind this feature, then present its concept and implementation. A conclusion about the current state and future directions of Collections will close the article.
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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.
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