# let's design a media player / cloud service



## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Ok, so I've had a little tiff with iTunes (it was all my fault, but still, it was stressful as all get-out) and looked around the web for alternatives. Nothing satisfies me.

What would you want from such a thing? Let's design our own.

We'll compile this and then I'll kidnap Tim Cook or Lee Kun-hee or Jeff Bezos or or Mark Sucker Borg (sorry) or Larry Page or someone like that and hold them hostage until they agree to meet our demands.

Here are my demands:

1. A large amount of cloud storage at a cheap price. I'd like to upload my CDs to some kind of lossless files, and play them from the cloud.

1a. Note that the service itself won't have to store all of our CDs. When I "upload" Kleiber's Beethoven 5 and 7 CD, all it has to do is give me access to those files in its storage. So that's good news for the jerks that own this thing.

1b. The player needs to be like an app that I can download to my phone and computer, and it needs to work all over the world.

2. The player should have all the regular features: Sort by artist, album, genre, mood, date of composition, date of recording, last played; scramble by album, scramble by track (movement); a "keep these tracks together when scrambling" feature; play count; ratings (like "one star" or "five stars" or whatever); and of course playlists.

2a. The "artist" file should distinguish between composer, conductor, orchestra/ensemble, and soloists. We should be able to collapse that all into "artist" if that's how we want to see it, or expand it if we want to see more precision. There should also be a category for librettist/lyricist. We should be able to specify whether we want to see the artists' full names or just surnames. (There could be a global setting and exceptions by artist, as perhaps I want surnames generally, but in the case of Clara Schumann or Johann Christian Bach I want to see the full name.)

2b. A track should be able to be listed as more than one genre. So, a single track could be simultaneously listed as "classical," "romantic," and "piano concerto" or perhaps ("piano and orchestra"). For the sake of the sort feature, one of those should be listed as "primary genre" (or something like that) and the rest can be "other."

2c. The "mood" field should work like the "genre" field.

2d. The default option with instrumental classical music tracks that do not have a title should be something like movement number and initial tempo. Like "3. Adagio molto e cantabile." (Please note that some words should not be capitalized. I asked the good Lord Himself how ugly is "Adagio Molto E Cantabile?" He evidently has not been able to think of an adequate response.) But we should be able to expand it if we want to see "Adagio molto e cantabile - Andante moderato - Tempo primo - Andante moderato - Adagio - Lo stesso tempo." There could be a global "always show initial tempo" option, "always show all tempi" option, a "never show tempi" option, and then we should be able to select some tracks as exceptions to the global option.

2e. All the diacritical marks should be correct. We should never have to see something like "Faure: Pelleas et Melisande" again. Ever. _Ever_.

3. The files should automatically arrange themselves into nested folders. As soon as I upload the Kleiber disk, there should be a "Classical Music" folder, and inside that a "By Composer" folder and others like that ("By Performer" at least). Inside the "By Composer" folder there'll be a "Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827)" folder, and inside that a "Symphony #5 in C minor, op. 67" folder, and inside that, a "Kleiber: Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (1974)" folder. And so on. Automatically.

4. There should be a social network component. You should be able to "friend" me like on facebook. I should be able to select privacy settings for each track (or perhaps each album). So, perhaps I want everyone to be able to see that I own Kleiber's Beethoven, only my friends to see that I own Rage Against the Machine's "The Battle of Los Angeles," and no one at all to see that I own the _Braveheart_ soundtrack. (For example.) Options should include at least, "Show everyone," "Show all friends," "Show selected friends," and "Show no one."

4a. We should be able to "lend" each other things. While I've loaned you the _Braveheart_ soundtrack, you will be able to listen to it and I won't, but it'll automatically revert to me after, say, a month. (Of course I should be able to take it back sooner if I want.) This is a phenomenal idea for the industry because at least sometimes you'll wind up buying the thing you've borrowed. They're dumber than rocks not to have set it up already. Idiots.

4b. The industry would want to lend us things all the time, so we should be able to set up some preferences about that, like whether or not we want to allow them to loan us rap or opera or whatever. Things "loaned by friends" and "loaned by strangers" should probably be normally kept separate for convenience's sake.

4c. For the teenagers, we should be able to make each other "mix tapes." There could be a charge for this (say, $1 per track, though u2's "With or Without You" should have an additional $1 sin tax applied). There could also be a "destroy mix tape" option, for really bad break-ups.

4d. We should be able to comment on the music (you can call it "review" if you want), and select the privacy options for our comments. Private "conversations" between friends should also be possible.

5. All the album art and liner notes should be available. (If the recording has been released a few times with different notes, we should be able to see all of them.)

6. The player should be able to play "online radio stations." They can be arranged something like Yahoo! Music used to do: "80s Hits," "Heavy Metal," and so on. For us classical fans, "Opera Highlights," "Romantic Russians," and so on. OF COURSE the industry will want us to be able to purchase what we hear on the radio. Probably a 1-click deal.

6a. Subscription services, like Spotify, should work through the player.

7. If this gets set up reasonably well, we can consider podcasts, movies, TV shows and so on. But for flying foo's sake let's at least get the music right first.


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## Kopachris (May 31, 2010)

(4b), (4c), (6), and (6a) are the only difficult ones, as those involve major licensing, which is always really expensive. Number (3) doesn't actually have to be done with "folders." I'm thinking it could be a big MySQL table to hold all of a user's tracks and tags, and then you can browse however you want (and can set it in the preferences) or search by tags (e.g. find all tracks with "adagio" in the title). Automatic tagging and (1a) would be difficult at best and impossible at worst because they rely on user interaction (someone uploads and tags something, another user uploads the same thing, system checks to see if it already exists) and/or licensing (whoever owns this thing gets a license to a ****-ton of music, pre-tagged by the publisher (that'd be a nightmare), system just checks what a user uploads against it's database). Can anyone think of any solutions to these? Because this would be an awesome project.


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## Klavierspieler (Jul 16, 2011)

8. There will no advertising of any kind during or between tracks.


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## Mephistopheles (Sep 3, 2012)

1. It looks to me like Google Music is going to be _the_ service in this regard, though it's sadly only available in the U.S. at the moment. If you're in the U.S., you really ought to be taking advantage of it!

[That link is a really cool interactive ad, by the way].

1a. So you just want to show proof of ownership, and then get the remote files? I think that would be a little awkward, and, though slower, it would be better to just upload your own tracks.

1b. A tick for Google Music for U.S. users. Personally, as a non-U.S. Android user, my preferred music player is PlayerPro, although, if you know what I'm talking about, you can just download the Google Music .apk from the web, though it won't be listed in the Play Store for updates on your phone.

2. Mobile apps are currently very limited in terms of advanced sorting functionality, and I don't know where to be looking for improvements in the future, but for a desktop application, I would _highly_ recommend MediaMonkey as one of the most powerful applications (and far less butt-ugly than WinAmp). I believe it does all your sorting points in (2) (the only one I'm uncertain about is the shuffle by album), and its playlists are fantastic, with either standard drag-and-drop, or the smartest smart playlists you can make.

2a. I don't think it's likely that you're going to get a player so intelligent about classical music that it's going to distinguish between different kinds of artists (intelligence is also a confound for 2e), but MediaMonkey has the largest number of customisable ID3 tags that I've seen. I personally use the artist field for performers and conductors; the composer field for composers; and from a maximum of 5, I use 3 renamed custom fields for orchestra, period, and nationality. These are all sortable so that if you ever want to just listen to 20th Century French music for an evening, that portion of your library is just a few clicks away.

2b. MediaMonkey allows you to put multiple entries in all tag fields, genre included (though this is more important for artist sorting, I'd say). The default separator is ";", but this can be changed.

2c. Another check for MediaMonkey.

2d. How is it supposed to know how to label a track if it doesn't have an initial title?  Personally, I prefer not to have tempo markings in my track titles (I just use movement markers, so, for example, Symphony No. X (Op. Y), I and Symphony No. X (Op. Y), II), so I don't think this should be universally enforced.

3. MediaMonkey has such an auto-organise function if you upgrade to the paid version (everything else is free, but you can actually get the paid version for free, legitimately, if you do a bit of hoop-jumping). You can have it automatically arrange things into folders by tags. So, for example, my current set-up is that I dump MP3s without thinking in a folder called "Recordings", and MediaMonkey automatically rearranges the files into a ~Recordings\<Album Name>\ hierarchy. Obviously, you can change what tags you want to become folders, and you can have as many levels as you like. This is particularly efficient because the application will immediately rename files and folders the instant you change a relevant tag name within the program, and will delete empty folders it created previously if you're no longer using them.

4. I'm personally not big on social functions, but another great thing about MediaMonkey is that you can customise it further with downloadable extensions. I am aware of a last.fm scrobbler, so you can indirectly use their service for sharing.

4a-4d. These are social components that no service offers that I'm aware of, though I don't much care.  Because I don't live in the U.S., I haven't been able to explore Google Music, but it does seem to have some unprecedented sharing functions such as listening to someone else's shared music once for free online.

5. That would be a good idea, although I personally would have no use for it. I'm quite idiosyncratic in my music collection in that I don't care for retaining original albums. Instead, I have a library of "fake" albums - for example, an album called "Brahms: Concertos" which collates the four concertos from three different albums. The main reason I do this is that it makes navigating the library easier, and it also means I don't end up with lots of duplicates that I don't fancy.

6. Online radio is integrated into MediaMonkey with Shoutcast and Icecast, although for some reason I can't get the BBC through these.

6a. I doubt that'll happen for Spotify because they force you to use their own desktop client, however MediaMonkey utilises tabs so that you can browse the internet from within the program, which means that any web-based service such as Grooveshark or Rdio can be used.

7. MediaMonkey also has a great utility for subscribing to podcasts by RSS.


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## Philip (Mar 22, 2011)

tl;dr .


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