Yet another music player

Minitunes artists view I’m starting a new ambitious Free Software project. Yes, that’s it, Yet Another Music Player™. I’ve got a few innovative UI concepts in mind that I hope will justify the incredible duplication of effort already present in this area. But the real reason I’m doing this is that my living room lacks a decent music player. You read it right. The gazillion Linux players around are all unusable, for a reason or another. I used to be an enthusiastic Amarok 1.x user a few years ago, then came KDE4 and Amarok2. I guess all good things must come to an end… Mac people are in an even worse position.

After the positive Minitube experience and since the new player will inherit part of its codebase, I’d like to call the new player Minitunes (hope I don’t get sued because of the last 5 letters). In the picture, a detail of the Collection view, showing the artists in my collection… Get ready for the brand new iTunes killer. No less. -.-

  1. symbianflo says:

    Still here to package your staff XD
    Minitube ia THE BIG DEAL ( at least for x86-64 arch, see flashplayer-plugin issues )
    and amarok2 just packaged the 2.2.0 version but is still far , far away from 1.4,
    lets see your player then XD

    PS: complimentoni ancora

  2. d0od says:

    Exciting news given the sheer “awesome” of minitube (not that i can get it to work on x64 ubuntu.. sob)

  3. Flavio says:

    I’m still not really sure I can really make my ideal music player reality. I’m still experimenting. What I can say for sure is that my sleeping hours are on a negative trend…

  4. Richard says:

    Looks interesting!
    Sounds perfect for my nettop :)

  5. David says:

    Waiting.
    I have a request. It would be nice with a filterbar with advanced operators. + – etc.

    When I want to listen to my collection of opera masterpieces in rhythmbox I use “opera” as a filter. But this includes Iron Maidens Phantom of the Opera and many other songs that just doesn’t fit in. So if you could do this it would be like the master of all features and I would use your player just for this…

  6. Stephan says:

    I understand you want sth simple as a music player. I´m using the opposite: Songbird – a mozilla-based itunes look-alike. Got attracted to it, mainly because of cover flow.

    About minitube: It was reviewed very positive in german linux beginner´s magazine: Easylinux (number 04-2009)

    http://www.easylinux.de/Artikel/ausgabe/2009/04

    Cheers,Stephan

  7. Flavio says:

    Thanks for letting me know, Stephan. As for Songbird, I prefer not to comment :)

  8. Vadim P. says:

    Haha, good luck! Personally I think what is needed is the hardware support, not the software side of the music players. Linux is, really, really full of all of the quality ones (and even my computer-illiterate mom can use one no probs).

    Minitube filled a niche, this… not really. But it’s all for fun :)

  9. Flavio says:

    Sure Vadim, a music player does not fill any niche… I’m doing it for the best possible reason I can think for a Free Software app. Scratching my own itch. ;)

  10. Brian says:

    Hey, Love you Minitube application and looking forward what you are gonna do with audio this time.
    Maybe something interesting for you, I have used a music player that sounds like something in the direction you are going (or am I totally wrong here?) the application was called Boffin (http://www.last.fm/group/Audioscrobbler+Beta/forum/30705/_/510180) and what it did was use the free audioscrobbler.net API from Last.fm to index all local music and then only display the genre in the player. So with this piece of software you could select the genre or multiple genres and let it run. Seeing last.fm knows about almost every song and the community added the genres these are almost always perfect.

    I really likes this because when listening to music i’m not constantly adding stuff to my playlist but normally am in a mood for a certain type of music.

    Guess there are more services where tools can be created to index music based on genre like musicbrainz.org ?

    Anyway.. just an idea :)

    Love your work!

  11. Flavio says:

    Hi Brian, wow you’re quite in tune with what I am trying to do. Minitunes will surely feature a tagcloud of YOUR music collection generated with the Last.fm tags. In general Minitunes is going to rely heavily on the AudioScrobbler web services. I’ll check out Boffin more in detail. Thanks for the tip!

  12. Marco says:

    Hi,

    Another idea was like develope a new P2P TV based Media Player,
    mean like able to Broadcast own TV Channel to a Decentral network like Kad/DHT.
    Users can watch avaible Channels or Broadcast yourself.

    There are lots of music Player avaible doesnt understand why you want do again same project which do some lots of people.

    http://qt-apps.org/index.php?xcontentmode=4220

  13. Mark says:

    a YOUTUBE killer would be even better!

  14. zacH says:

    Hey, not to completely halt your project (har har), but I saw you were a big amarok classic fan. Do you know about Clementine?

    http://code.google.com/p/clementine-player/

    It’s still a pretty new project, but it’s exactly what I was looking for in a player. You should check out a build from svn, it’s very stable and way more feature-filled than the current release. Hope it brings you some nostalgia, if nothing else… and good luck on Minitune!

  15. Flavio says:

    @zacH, thanks for the tip, I tried it. Yes, tons of nostalgia. Of course Amarok 1.x design shows its age. Since it is Qt4 I guess I’ll steal everything I can from their codebase :D