Huge Media Players
What's the deal with new media players having a huge interface? iTunes (I haven't used it on a Mac) and its clones (yellowTAB jukebox thing among them) need the full screen to work and are always displaying the library.
Am I in the minority of wanting a player which might have a library feature, but plays the music out of the way? In Windows I use Winamp in its shadded form and in BeOS I use the revered SoundPlay, both of which sit at the bottom of the screen and don't get in my way.
So what is going on with this trend?
Comments
Huge Media Players
iTunes (at least on the Mac) doesn't have its playlist window visible, if you don't want it. It's your choice to have the playlist window visible, or not. And I think, that's the right way.
I agree with you that the jukebox app shouldn't force its window(s) on the desktop.
Thomas
Huge Media Players
in iTunes, hit ctrl+m to switch to mini-mode, at which point you get a small little interface displaying only the song title and the control buttons... They should make that feature more obvious though. It's actually under the Advanced menu for some reason, but whatever. Personally, I like having my library open... I use the search tools quite often, but then again, I have my desktop at 1600x1200 and often just minimize itunes when I'm lettting it play in the background.
And as for others... as far as I know, every player out there should have a scaled down mode. I know windows media player does, they have a big button to get to it on their interface. I don't really use anything other than iTunes, MP, and VLC though.
Huge Media Players
It's a matter of taste and habit.
I am more used to having maximized apps since I am a Windows/OS/2 user. So I tend to prefer WMP 9 over WinAMP (both have horrible UIs but that's another story).
Re: Huge Media Players
I don't know, but I hope it's going away. Mediaplayer companies don't seem to understand that playing media is a secondary function, not something you dedicate the entire computer to doing all the time.
Huge Media Players
Suppafly
"Mediaplayer companies don't seem to understand that playing media is a secondary function, not something you dedicate the entire computer to doing all the time."
Ah! then, what, why....BeOS!!! La!
...
Huge Media Players
kidding.
Huge Media Players
Personally, i think that library is not really a must have, but a playlist is.
A good new Mediaplayer has to have a tabbed system for playlists. That would be a better thing than a big library.
- A playlist could be a folder (so each time you open this playlist, it puts everything in this folder and subfolders in, but doesn't take care about .m3u or .pls) or just a .m3u or .pls file.
- Each should have their own settings for random and repeat
- The choise to have (or not) a specific equaliser settings for each could be an option (so for your techno playlist, you could set an highly bass equaliser, and a more low bass equaliser settings for classic music playlist).
I don't give a fuck if it can broadcast throw the internet (a dedicated program should do it better), encoding or decoding mp3 files (a dedicated app that takes CDDB attributes of my cd would be far far far better) or play some horrible graphics effects during playing music.
That would be a good new modern media player.
RealOne gives me news ... well ... i just want to listen to my music, i don't care about the latest Bush stupid thing. iTunes tells me that AAC is the best format everytime i encode a CD but i don't care !!!! My car radio recognizes mp3 so i want to use mp3. Same for WMP and its sucky wma format.
Huge Media Players
With BeOS, the "Library" could simply be a query... and each playlist could also be a query.... there are problems with sorting though - most people like to set up the ORDER of the playlist, and that can't be easily done unless there's some control-data stored somewhere (m3u, pls)
Huge Media Players
How about extending Aplayer with tabbed dynamic playlists with support for sortable attributes and filtering. If it could be similar to foobar2000 (but better :P ) then it would be the perfect audio player.