Media player design

Design
#2

Another quirk the media player has is ignoring the album artist. Take for example Random Access Memories by Daft Punk (metadata on MusicBrainz), which has some songs featuring other artists. The artist tag is not the same for each of the tracks in my case, since they include the featured artists, while the album artist tag is set to “Daft Punk” for each track. When browsing the available albums, the artist shows up as “various artists” (roughly translated from Dutch), while “Daft Punk” is what I’d expect.

Coincidentally the music player seems to ignore each of the “cover.jpg” files inside the albums made by “various artists”, while it seems to pick up those in albums made by a single person for some reason. But this could be a coincidence.

3 Likes
#3

You could also try Unplayer, it’s similar in design but better: https://openrepos.net/content/equeim/unplayer

As for the artist/album artist: personally I think it makes more sense to have the featuring artist(s) in the song title, rather than the artist tag, but you should also be able to add multiple artist tags, so instead of

artist:Daft Punk feat. Julian Casablancas
albumartist:Daft Punk

You’d have

artist:Daft Punk
artist:Julian Casablancas
albumartist:Daft Punk

I think that makes the albums show up the way you want them to.

1 Like
#4

More a general thing affecting all music players: Native support for more Audio Codecs out of the Box. Apple Lossless (Alac) is the one I miss most, especially since its installag the gstreamer packages from openrepos don’t solve that any longer since Rokua…

#5

It would be nice if the media player supported streaming from LAN sources like FTP, samba, upnp, http etc.

6 Likes
#6

Another feature I like in Flowplayer is the ability to download automatically artist images and display them in a grid view. I would love to see it in media player as well.

3 Likes
#7

When playing all the songs that I have in my device, and playing shuffle, it will not show the artcover of any song. It will just do it in albums and artist, but not in songs. Is something that can be changed?
And by the way, what about a musci player like FlowPlayer??

#8

Two things would make it a whole lot better for me personally…automatically downloading covers from the web and the ability to refresh the media library manually instead of automatically every time you open the app. If one has an extensive library, it often loads for quite a long time.

1 Like
#9

Yes yes yes… How can I say it?
The stock MediaPlayer has a biiig improvement potential :–)

When I shuffle play my (numerous) songs, I sometime want to delete one or add it to playlist.
But the song isn’t highlighted. I is lost somewhere after 500 other songs, impossible to (reasonably) find by scrolling.

Another strange phenomenon:
Shuffle doesn’t seem to be a real random. To me, it plays very often the same bands/songs. For you too?

An auto-generated playlist “recently played” would be cool too.

In the mean time, I’m gonna try other players.
Some advices since last year (Unplayer, Flowerplayer)?

2 Likes
#10

If you hear some songs again and aigain it might be a sign of a good random algorithm…
What we most probably want is a good shuffle: a random permutation of a song list. And it’s not that easy.

#11

Generally, hearing a song again and again is more likely a sign of a good song :joy:

But here, it is too frequently happening for being just random in my feeling.
I know a good random algorithm is hard to build. It needs to be kind of assisted.
I built one myself in a script once, and added it a way not to read songs twice.

I tried Flow Player (not flowerplayer) but it cannot install because of missing some /usr/lib/libsndfile.so.1 file.
Unplayer seems nice though.

#12

Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating the quality of random number generators. It would help if you collected some statistics to convince us that it’s the way you claim.

#13

It is just a feeling. I I am the only one with it, it means I am particularly bad at evaluating the quality of random number generators.
I am switching to Unplayer. If it happens also there, I’ll write that down and report more objectively.

#14

Most users don’t want ‘real randomness’, but ‘semi randomness’. Winamp has some settings for both.

2 Likes
#15

I would really like a ‘select by directory’ (folder) option. In the moment I have only New playback list, all titles (1756 titles), all albums 106 albums), and interprets (155 interprets). It’s a huge mess.
The mp3 files of my music collection are sorted by directories, with the titles in it.
Mediaplayer makes a huge mess of it.

4 Likes
#16

Would be great if audio files were indexed in a background thread, from my point of view, indexing seems to occur via the main thread?

I inserted an SD card with nearly 10,000 songs and it seems to be indexing them all (currently at 1070 songs and it has been at it for about 20mins.)

While the indexing is going on, the UI is nearly completely locked up, though to my surprise music plays without stuttering.

#17

@tpaul Can you create a bug report about that? Just describe what behavior you saw. I doubt that it is running on the main thread, but still interesting that it locks.

#18

I got a different thing. Each time I create new playlist I can add few songs to it just fine, but the more songs I add, each time I add another device become unresponsive for longer perioid of time and as one can imagine creating playliast is painfully long and frustrating.

It is the same with XA2, 10 II and 10 III :frowning:

#19

Can you also create a bug report with steps to reproduce? @Ride92

#20

@thigg dumb question: What’s the official avenue for bug reports? ZenDesk?

Thanks

2 Likes
#21

Just create a topic in the bug reports category here in the forum. You can also use the bugger app to gather the basic information from your device