I like my music, although I find that I can't stand sticking headphones over (or in) my ears in the normal course of events. When I buy a CD I carefully rip the music off it so I can then put the CD in a cupboard. This has saved quite a number of them from the never-to-be-underestimated destructive power of an absent-minded child.

Over the years I have had a kind of low-key desire to find some decent software to allow me to find, categorise, playlist and free-associate all this music. It's been a "low-key" desire because I wrote my own software to do this some time ago, but it's kind of crude (browse artists / albums, find artists / albums containing tracks matching a regex, enqueue / pause / stop). This is mostly OK for me because I wrote the software and know how to work it, and it provides some ability to stumble over tracks that had been forgotten, but I think the UI really must suck quite a lot since Heather generally prefers to use the CD player directly.

What makes my requirements so hard to meet is that the PC I play my music from is in a cupboard and it doesn't have a keyboard, mouse or screen. I guess most people wanting to set up a "multimedia PC" actually want more than one media on it. We don't have a television in our house, so the cupboard is just fine. Everything is on the LAN, so we can use the keyboard / mouse / screen of our local PCs.

That's all well and good, but playing music is kind of fickle. I don't want us fighting over what stream is playing at the moment, or (possibly even worse) just mixing them all together. Also, the music is on the computer, and the soundcard is on that computer - so there shouldn't be a need for the files to be transferred across the network twice to play them. Sometimes I like the music to still be playing when I'm rebooting my laptop too.

So on Friday night, Brenda pointed me at Amarok, suggesting that it does evrything that anyone could possibly want in their music player, pointing out that it even had these plugin scripts that it could run, which would allow for a web interface and everything...

On Saturday I installed it, and I must say that it is the most sophisticated music player I have come across, and it really did help me find and categorise my music through a very well thought out interface. Unfortunately that well thought out interface only applies to the GUI, meaning that I still need to be SSH'd into my music server to control it fully. The web interface scripts are unfortunately fairly simple and still require substantial mucking around.

I love New Zealand music in particular, and one of the things I thought Amarok did particularly well was handling podcasts. The ease with which I was able to add an RSS feed and play episodes from it immediately encouraged me to catch up on Liz Barry's NZ Music show which has always wanted to play on my laptop when I use my normal RSS reader. Now that I've done this through Amarok I can see that whatever I switch to will need to support this sort of thing in a straightforward manner.

It all looks pretty hopeful though so I might look to taking some client/server model music player, tying it into the Amarok database, and making a front-end work with that. I'll probably pick over my existing code and see if something could be done with that, or take a look at Music Player Daemon (mpd) which seems to start with many of the ideas about remote control that are right for me, albeit without the database support that I like in my own setup, and which Amarok seems to do very well.

I've done all my interface coding for my existing setup as a web front-end. The Music Player Daemon doesn't rely on a web interface though - it is a more traditional client-server model, and this is undoubtedly a good way to be for something where the action happens at both ends in an asynchronous manner. There certainly seem to be a good set of clients for mpd.

In any case the time has definitely come to reexamine my options for playing music. It's probably five years since I set this up and wrote my crude player and the world has moved on.