This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who knows me, but I can be picky at times. Beyond my well-known hatred of vegetables, water, and all foods healthy, I expect software to work for me, the way I think it should. For years I have stood strong against the influx of new and popular music players, continuing to use my tried-and-true applications of yore, but I have recently been courting the dark side. I have just a few simple rules that a music-playing application should follow to be worthy of my use, as follows:
- The player should never, ever, EVER make any changes to my media files or the hierarchical structure in which they are stored without an explicit command from me to do so. I am very particular about both my structure and my metadata, and I will not tolerate them being destroyed.
- Allow me to use the hierarchical structure of my media files on disk to choose media to play.
- Display the metadata that I have included (ID3v1.1) with my files in your interface.
- The media player should not require an Internet connection to work, nor should it ever connect to any network resource without an explicit command from me to do so.
- As with all background-type applications, do not use an excessive amount of my computer’s resources.
- As with all background-type applications, get out of the way of my interface. (For Windows applications, this means minimize to the system tray.)
For many years, my player of choice was the ubiquitous Winamp 2.79. It adhered to the first 5 of my rules and, at the time, was one of very few options. In fact, I still have my old version of Winamp installed, although I do not use it as a music player now, because it contains the simplest and fastest ID3v1.1 tag editor I have ever found.
About 5 years ago I needed support for playing FLAC files and took the opportunity to move to a more modern player, foobar2000. In addition to providing playback for FLAC, SHN, and nearly every other useful sound encoding format, foobar2000 was seemingly designed with all of my rules in mind. To this day I have no significant complaints against it, other than lack of cross-platform support.
Through this time there was a great rise in popularity of “media library”-style players, led by Musicmatch Jukebox and successors. I have always kept as far away as possible from these types of software, as they typically violate most if not all of my rules.
For the past year of so I have been collecting non-commercial concert recordings. Initially I only played the concerts as a whole, and will probably continue to do so in most cases. Due to limitations of hard disk space and CDs, however, I have reluntantly started integrating these recordings into my MP3 collection. Since they are there, I would like to be able to shuffle through songs from both these and my commercial albums. Unfortunately, there is often a very large difference in volume among these.
There is a standard, known as ReplayGain to determine an amount of gain to add to a recording on a per-file or per-album basis to make all files have roughly the same perceived loudness. This would be an excellent solution to my problem, but the standard writes this information into the front of the media file, much like an ID3 tag. For various reasons, this is unacceptable.
Thus, I have begun turning towards that which I have hated. Apple’s iTunes supports a ReplayGain-like feature but, being Apple, they have their own proprietary system rather than following the standard. In this one case this works out for me, because iTunes’s Sound Check system stores the suggested gain in a separate iTunes metadata file, leaving my media files untouched. I installed iTunes on my work computer a few days ago to try this out and have had mixed feelings so far. There is no question that iTunes is of the “media library”-style players which I have despised. In its default configuration, iTunes is a flagrant violator of pretty much all of my rules. If hit with a big enough stick it can be made to abide by rules 1, 4, and 6. So far I have not found a way to get rules 2 and 3 working, although I hold out hope. (iTunes does indeed display much metadata about media and allow you to create playlists based on it, but it chooses to determine the genre of a song, for example, from some online database rather than what I chose when I wrote the ID3 tag.) I have not yet used it enough to have an opinion about its resource use. However, features such as storing the number of times each file has been played (in a separate file, of course!) seem like they will be useful. I am not ready to switch to the dark side yet, but I am seeing some of its merits.