A Series of Unlikely Explanations

MP3 Software and Why it Sucks

It’s just impossible to find music library software that supports the small list of features that I need. I don’t think it’s greedy to expect a music player to:

1. Use a reasonable amount of memory
2. Be able to cope with a large library (mine is 300 gigs)
3. Start up reasonably fast, and not spent 30 seconds paging itself back into memory whenever you switch back to it

Those are the complete necessaries. The fun things it would be nice to have are, I think…

1. Visualisations
2. Global hotkeys so you can control music while in any application
3. Monitoring of your library so you can just add new music in Windows and not have to bother doing it in the player too
4. iPod support (otherwise you have to use iTunes for everything)
5. Audioscrobbler support for Last.fm
6. CD burning support

And this is why all the players currently available suck total and complete balls. Except one.

1. iTunes. Uses 64 megs of memory when you run it for the first time. That’s even without any music. This is because it has an integrated web browser to try and get you to use the iTunes Store. It completely falls apart when you add any serious amount of music to it. And it can’t cope with fun file formats like flac. The only good thing is the visualisations, which are actually awesome.
2. Winamp. SLOW and MEMORY GREEDY. I mean, horribly, horribly slow. This isn’t just because I don’t have a superfast machine. It’s because it uses a stupid database system that breaks down if you have lots of audio.
3. Songbird. This was extremely promising, and has interesting things like automatic prediction of what you feel like listening to next. But when you start to add music to it it just eats up memory like a Core Wars bot.
4. MusikCube. This looks great and uses an ultrafast database. It even has global hotkeys. But when you search for something, and then do ANYTHING else, your search results disappear. So you have to do the search again and wait for the database. Which is incredibly annoying. Plus it doesn’t support any plugins.
5. Something stupid called Billy which is just not worth considering. It’s quite fast but it has no features.

This leaves the winner. But it’s victory by default as opposed to merit.

Foobar. It’s awesome in that you can customize the user interface to your heart’s delight, it’s small and dead fast because it uses a similar database to MusikCube, and it has beautiful sound quality. It also manages to cope with 0.3 TB of audio.

However, it has no visualisations and you have to manually save ALL your playlists every time you make changes, otherwise Foobar will crash and lose them. Sigh. And there’s no CD burning support or cool things like intelligent prediction.

But it only uses 8 megs when minimized, and you can still control it with the global hotkeys. So it’s going to have to do.

But why oh WHY can’t the open source gods get their arses in gear and come up with a SERVICEABLE music player? They’re awesome at nearly every other type of software. Even keyloggers, for God’s sake.