I also assign multiple performers and sometimes artists. As I said in an earlier comment, a system that limits this in a fundamental way is seriously broken.

Nice post, by the way, I enjoyed reading it.

“Sit (in the panel?) and respond to control and information requests over dbus.”

To my mind, a panel applet would be a separate component using the music queue/play service.

“Not need to know anything about music libraries”

Absolutely right, this is not a UI concern. It’s a matter of the background play service providing a good API for searching music.

I think many of the benefits that apply to Telepathy apply here too: splitting stuff into UI/D-Bus services wins you desktop/license/language independence, which I believe all lead to better code reuse. It frees UI developers to worry about how the UI works as opposed to the underlying mechanism of how music is indexed/searched/played.

I think the real distinguishing feature of this approach, though, is improved availability of information/control. E.g. it’s trivial for your IM program to know which track you’re currently playing because there is a standard D-Bus interface for it. Likewise for when your phone app wants to pause your music when there’s an incoming call (the Nokia 770/N800 use exactly this approach to this problem).

One way to do this is to create a playlist for each mood, and add each song to the corresponding playlists. One problem is that this would take a lot of work, another is that these lists are not browsable like a genre is in i.e. Rhythmbox.

The nice way to do this would be to allow multiple mood: tags to be added to songs automatically using last.fm, and make these tags browseable. (Looking for a calm album? Go to calm, check out the album list, and pick one.)

Issue 1: I cannot store 100 or 300 GBs of files on my laptop. I want only a subset of the entire collection for non-networked playback, anything added in the last X weeks plus all 4 and 5 star rated songs.

Rules and ratings should be user-defined, as my 9 year old girl and I have different yardsticks for determining what a 5 star song sounds like.

Issue 2: While in range of my home network I use Avahi to connect to the collection but I currently see duplicates of all songs that are both on the music share and my local computer.

Issue 3: Synchronization.

Ideally, synchronization would first update ratings and changed metadata from my local copy to my music share. It would upload any new music on my local machine that I’ve downloaded or burned from CD to the music share, remove low-rated music from my local system and download highly-rated music.

Feel free to write to me if any of the sounds interesting. I’d be happy to provide details and use-cases.

Cheers!

Monolithic applications are bad? Splitting them up and using IPC between components is better and will fix “sluggishness”? Integrating everything into the desktop (whatever that means) will improve user experience?

I’m not saying any of these are necessarily false, but it’d be a good idea to think about it before you go and complicate matters like you’re proposing to here.

IMHO everything should be just like Telepathy, all those services available as interfaces. So different UI’s can use different implementations of the services. So for example an IM application can query the current playing song trough a certain interface, it doesn’t matter which application or daemon implements it.

What I would like to see is a way select a couple files from Nautilus and either play or queue them in Rhythmbox or whatever, without necessarily adding them to the db.

Also an application that can semi-automatically tag my music, probably from last.fm, musicbrainz, freedb or whatever.

Of course, the really important thing is what actually gets done.