On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:57 PM, Thaths <[email protected]> wrote: Of course, this implies you have to live with the abominations like > Rhythmbox, Banshee for music on your netbook. >
The music bit needs more explanation. I use iTunes. I like iTunes. It is the only sensible audio library management framework I've seen. However, iTunes is also past its prime. My library's outgrown iTunes's ability to manage it: 1. My laptop no longer has enough space to hold all my music. Much of it now lives on network storage, accessed via mt-daapd. 2. Song ratings and library management don't work for such network-hosted music. 3. My library's too large for me to personally pick something to listen to. I can no longer remember what I like and haven't heard in a while. 4. I used to depend on ratings and play counts to build smart playlists, but Last.fm and iTunes Genius have made that obsolete, so it no longer matters that all my music is in one library. 5. My good speakers are not attached to my laptop. I use Airfoil to stream music to the Linux box where they are (because my Airport Express blew up). Airfoil has lesser wireless network jitter than Pulseaudio, which I used to use from the netbook. 6. iTunes has an elaborate UI, which the competitors will have a hard time replicating, but which is also mostly not needed. Who wants to look at cover notes or visualisations? I just want to play random songs that I've indicating liking before, or pick one and play similar songs. And I don't want to be streaming from my laptop to a remote box when the song itself may be hosted on that box. There's no need for the intelligence to be on my laptop. I only need the controls here. Given all this, it's time for music management to move to the cloud, where the cloud begins on the local network. Music Player Daemon [1] sounds like a step in the right direction, except it's a long leap from network playback to network library management. I have my hopes up for an Linux-hosted solution because this is overall not a GUI problem. The key bits of technology are all there. Someone needs to just put it together. (And I probably will, if I find myself Mac-less in the coming year.) [1] http://mpd.wikia.com/
