Some ideal audio player goals (first draft)

For the sake of organizing my own thoughts, here is an attempt to distill the wordy audio player-related posts I made last year into a draft of a clearer set of goals.  It is still fairly undigested for now, I hope it will help to bring focus to the next stage of brainstorming and prototyping.

Here a draft , in no particular order:

• Change assumptions about the roles of specific metadata fields:
  • Tracks ought to be incidental signposts within more interesting metadata groupings
    • Current players tend to [over]emphasize tracks as the only playback atoms in the UI
  • Use accurate terms in UI, and not 1337 h1pst0r mp3 slang
    • Please, ’song’ -> ‘track’.  ‘Song’ is a logical subset of ‘track’.  Music tracks aren’t necessarily songs.  Audio tracks aren’t necessarily music.
• Minimize disruptions to the user workflow with smarter shuffling, less time/fewer interruptions spent requesting music
  • More flexibly take advantage of metadata as simple basis for user-configured track grouping
    • “Random track” prevents appropriate track grouping, and “random album” is too rigid
    • Shuffled track grouping needs to be configurable, based at least on metadata rules; i.e., group Pink Floyd albums and classical pieces, but not Britney Spears
    • This would require good metadata to work well.
  • Try to imitate patterns in user playback requests; when shuffling, find track groupings with metadata similar to current playback [to avoid jarring style shifts] and/or to recent requests [to try to match user 'mood'].
• Be a team player as a desktop component – make it easy (e.g. through d-bus) for other applications to request playback
  • There ought to be a freedesktop.org “standard” for this..
• Don’t reimplement general desktop infrastructure features, notably w.r.t.
  • Indexing; use beagle, tracker, strigi et al through xesam
  • File playback; use gstreamer
• Maintain directed scope of application.  Monolithic do-everything applications are difficult to integrate nicely into a desktop.  Dammit, Jim, I’m a music playback app, not:
  • A tagger
  • An alarm clock
  • A portable music player manager
  • A wikipedia browser
  • A CD ripper
  • But not really sure about web radio etc…

I’ve been thinking by myself for too long about this, so please leave feedback and set me straight