All I ask of a music player is to give it a directory with all the music files in it, and then say "play shuffle". That's it.
Sadly, the only player which will do that is Microsoft Media Player. All the others suffer from one fault or another which causes it to fail:
1. requires installing some third party "server" because sharing the directory isn't enough. The "server" then proceeds to consume all the resources of your computer, regardless of whether it is serving or not. I presumed it was trying to copy all my files to the NSA. What else would it be doing with disk drive light on all the time? for days?
2. does not look at subdirectories. Your music all has to be in one top-level folder.
3. randomly hangs and scrambles its music database (better keep a backup!)
4. hangs if you have more than some undisclosed number of music files
5. if you have more than some undisclosed number of music files, it only plays the first N files
6. displays the bit rate of the file being played. Does not display the name, artist, or album.
7. hangs if the USB stick is a large capacity one
I've tried PC software, Linux software, two different Roku media players (including the default one), 4 different internet radios that promised to play media files from a USB device
I've used mpd since my early college years, often in shuffle mode. Always works. None of the issues you describe.
I'm also confident VLC should work, but I haven't tried it for this purpose (because mpd never gave me a reason to), and I'm sure you've tried that already.
Heck, Roku doesn't even work. They've sold what, a million of those Roku boxes? For years? And their !@#$%^&* music player does not work, and never has.
I think it was VLC on Ubuntu that would randomly delete or corrupt its music database. I kept having to rebuild it. The VLC support people told me I was just imagining this :-/
I don't bother filing bug reports anymore on any product (other than D Foundation things), as never in 40 years has that ever produced a positive result. Open source, closed source, makes no difference. I just complain on HN :-)
The only one that actually worked was the Turtle Beach Audiotron, until they went out of business which bricked it, because naturally the device was designed to phone home to Turtle Beach and crash if nobody picked up, even to play local music files.
Bro there aren't many players that can't do this... This is a fundamental feature of tens of standalone music players. You just need to explore more than Roku or any other streaming service.
Creator of Museeks here, a little late for the party. There are many comments in this thread, and the usual electron-bashing we're all used to at this point, so I'll just make a few points:
- I know all the cons of using Electron, thank you
- I started writing this piece of software 8 years ago, for me, to learn horizontal software development (ui, db, releases, binaries, cd, testing, etc), at a time I dropped out from university and I had to learn stuff in order to find a job and pay my rent
- Nowadays, I still use this project to experiment with technologies I want to learn or play with
- I truly don't care you don't like it (the app, or electron itself), my only purpose is to share something solving a real problem for me, for free
- If this app is useful to only one person other than me, and angers the HN crowd, I'll still be happy about it, and it will still be worth the hundreds or thousand hours I put on this
> This is the culmination of 4 years' work since the 5.8 release.
> Two dev teams, and a pandemic-induced hiatus period inbetween.
> To the end-user, it might not seem like there's a whole heap of changes, but the largest and hardest part was actually migrating the entire project from VS2008 to VS2019 and getting it all to build successfully.
> The groundwork has now been laid, and now we can concentrate more on features. Whether fixing/replacing old ones or adding new.
It won't be applicable to everyone, but I want to give a plug to Sonixd[1]: it's a Subsonic client, meaning that it'll work with Subsonic or any other music server that uses the Subsonic API (Navidrome, Airsonic, gonic).
It's an Electron application, which won't be for anyone, but it's sufficiently smooth and snappy for me.
MusicBee can import iTunes libraries. It's a solid player that provides a lot of customizability in its front end. It's especially good for tagging and organizing your music just how you like.
I did look at the project, and it didn't mention it was a leaning exercise, then, pointing out that requiring a gig of dependencies is questionable is reasonable.
It's a repetitive trope complaint that is reducible to "I don't like these things". Not liking these things is reasonable but it's bad HN commentary because generic repetition is bad HN commentary.
I've been working on something similar. It's currently in electron but I'm working on porting it to tauri since I agree that ideally you'd want a music player to be lighter on system resources than electron apps are. So far the tauri version uses a small fraction of the ram and disk space.
Has Qt improved its aethetics/appearance? My experience with Qt apps is that they have a distinctive non-native look and feel that's a bit off-putting to me.
What does look like the native UI? I'm not a Mac user so maybe that platform has some uniformity? Windows is a total mish-mash and just about every app and utility for the past 20 years (even MS Office) has had its own "skin". On Linux, Gnome and KDE constantly redesign things, and every distro is different, so there isn't really a standard. The only things I can think of that are consistent are the utilities that come with the DE, but most of the apps I use on Linux are either browsers or IDEs, each with their own style, or console stuff (and even then, the UX varies!)
I'm a bit bewildered by these memory complaints. RAM usage on desktop applications hasn't been an issue for 20ish years. Open up your process manager once in a while.
It is an issue on machines with 2GB of ram or lower.
And there is no good reason we should throw away those perfectly working machines just because devs are lazy waste creators and global warming mothafokers.
While I prefer native apps, I’m fine with electron and web apps as long as the ui is good to use and to look at.
Some electron apps are great to use, many have terrible UIs. But in my experience all Qt apps are ugly. I was wondering if Qt has been working on improving that.
Sadly, the only player which will do that is Microsoft Media Player. All the others suffer from one fault or another which causes it to fail:
1. requires installing some third party "server" because sharing the directory isn't enough. The "server" then proceeds to consume all the resources of your computer, regardless of whether it is serving or not. I presumed it was trying to copy all my files to the NSA. What else would it be doing with disk drive light on all the time? for days?
2. does not look at subdirectories. Your music all has to be in one top-level folder.
3. randomly hangs and scrambles its music database (better keep a backup!)
4. hangs if you have more than some undisclosed number of music files
5. if you have more than some undisclosed number of music files, it only plays the first N files
6. displays the bit rate of the file being played. Does not display the name, artist, or album.
7. hangs if the USB stick is a large capacity one
I've tried PC software, Linux software, two different Roku media players (including the default one), 4 different internet radios that promised to play media files from a USB device
So what do I use? Microsoft Media Player.