I recently wrote an article in Winamp forum, and someone suggested me to copy-paste it here. So here it is, with some comments about MJ at the bottom:
--------------------
I have been thinking in my perfect media player. And even I think is a quite simple and obvious thing, I do not find it.
I think the three key features have to be:
1.- A good "media library"
2.- A good "playlist editor"
3.- A good "tag editor"
4.- Beautiful Interface
Obviously, the perfect media player has to support any audio format, or -at least- the two commonest ones (Mp3, WMA).
About the library:
Winamp3 media library is pretty cool. The best I have seen for mp3 (does not work with WMA files). But I will add some features:
- Most albums are just from one artist, so the album list could be "Artist name - Album name". However, some albums contain multiple artist, so this albums could be managed as "Various artist - Album name". I am not suggesting to eliminate the album and artist lists (on the top of WA Media Library), I suggest to include a new optional presentation following the exposed criteria (mixing artist and album names). Why do I suggest this? Because if I look into the the artists list, I see many artist with few songs (in my library), and usually are artists that I do not recognize, and therefore I do not get a rapid idea of what music is into the library. And because if I look into the albums, I do not always recognize them just for the album name (i need the artist name).
- The media library of my perfect media player would be able to browse by folder name. I know it exists a plug-in that does it. But it would have to be integrated with the library. For instance, the artist list actually can be changed by a album, comment, genre or year list. Why not a folder list? Another option (complementary), would be to add another item under {All media, audio files, CD tracks, http streams, Video files}. This new item would be "My PC", or "My music folder".
Well. Let's talk about the "Playlist editor".
- I would offer the option to the user to select the columns that he wants to see. Why does Winamp just show title, and duration? What about the artist, the album, or the file name? Is it possible to add/remove/arrange/sort columns? It does not seems difficult to implement. I have seen (surprised) similar limitation in many media players/jukeboxes.
Third point: The "Tag editor".
Under my opinion, this is the weakest point of Winamp.
- Why the window is not resizable?
- Why does not appear the lyrics field? Should I use the comments field for lyrics? If so, it is to small to be useful.
- Is it possible to select multiple files and change the album just on one step?
I like the Musicmatch Jukebox tag editor.
I also like the Windows Media capability to tag just from the "Media library" (without an additional form).
I suggest to Winamp to take the best of each one, adding a new feature:
- I would offer the option for renaming an album, or an artist name from the Media Library (the top lists of WA Media Library). All files should be tagged accordingly (in background).
The forth feature of my perfect media player would be a "beautiful interface". Here Winamp is perfect. Far better of anything else.
Well. These are my wills. Am I asking for too much? I do not think so.
I even would pay for it.
Regards,
Polonio
--------------------------
When I wrote that post I didn’t know about MJ. Now, MJ is my preferred player (though I have 6 or 7 installed in my computer
).
MJ is pretty cool, and solve correctly the majority of my demands. However, there is always things to improve. Here some suggestions:
a) In my perfect media player, tag info should update into files by four ways:
1.- Auto update on change (just like MJ does now)
2.- Update on-demand (would update info files that has been modificated, not all)
3.- Update in background (continuously updating changed info files, without any modal window).
4.- Never update (no change files)
Actually, I do not know how to update just the changed infos. My library has about 4000 files, and I changed about 300 hundreds of them (from different artists, folders, and so on). How can I just update these files without updating the others 3700?
b) Reading hundreds of files tags will always be a slow action. So why read again the tag if I just want change the album or artist name?
c) Why I cant select/rename a couple of items at the same time from the tree view?
d) I would appreciate the ability to switch between a tree view and a table view of the library. RealOne (for instance) shows in a table these columns: artist/#clips/total duration, and allow to sort them by any column. Why MJ does not do that? Or does?
e) A stupid warning appears if I change the song name (for instance) while the “Autoupdate tags” is unchecked. If I change a lot of songs at the same time, it results very annoying.
f) “Album artist” or “Has cover” are columns that do no appear in the tables. Why?
g) In my opinion, the best library view is “Artist album/album”. To do that I spent a lot of time for populate correctly the “Artist album” field. It would be possible for MJ to autopopulate this (or other) field? And, why other apps do not see/show this tag?
h) My perfect media player would work with some calculated fields. For instance:
1.- “Artist – Album” (“Queen – Innuendo”, “The Doors – Waiting for the sun”, etc.)
2.- “Top Artists”. The idea is to group artists with few songs in a fictitious artist called “Other artists”.
3.- “Top Albums”. It would group albums with few songs (incomplete albums) or not catalogued songs in a fictitious album called “Other songs from [artist]”.
The minimum number of songs (or total duration) to be a “real” artist or a “real” album would be customizable.
This way, anyone would be able to organize his own collection with very little effort.
The more important issues for me are a), d) and h). I even would pay for it.
By the way, every option seems to be working without limitation and I didn’t buy the product yet. How long it will work?
Any comment appreciated.
polonio_@yahoo.com