Wma Music Player Library For Mac
Floriana Monterroza
But I very much dislike the way usually music library is displayed in most recommended players, according to Artist/Album/Year/Genre tags, ignoring my folder structure or making it hardly accessible.
The problem is that not all my music is tagged according to genre etc, but all is perfectly ordered by folder structure which takes into account all characteristics handled by tags, as well as many others, which I can change and specify at any time. (I can decide ordering my music by country, inside a sub-category like "baroque music", for example).
The advantage of using folder-structure-display of medialibrary is that all the logical structure is displayed, with all sub-categories, which can be sub-detailed, varied, and changed at wish and be all visible at the same time.
First, an example is Foobar2000 in Wine. Foobar2000 has different ways of displaying media library, my favorites being Album list (foo_albumlist, component installed by default) and especially Facets (foo_facets, component to be manually installed). I am aware that finding something better than Foobar2000 is unlikely. The downside of Foobar is of course using Wine.
DeadBeef has a plugin called File Browser that displays the media library as folder structure. You need to select the path to the library: Edit-Preferences-Plugins-File browser-Configure. Only one such path can be set, which is a limitation.
Thereon, it operates much the same way, except there are no tabbed playlists. These are accessible from a separate left-pane, Playlists > Saved playlists; they cannot be created from within the file browser. To create one, the easy way is to create a current playlist, go to Playlists as indicated (Playlists > Saved playlists), select the current playlist content and dra&drop it among the saved playlists.
Quod Libet. Choose View - File System, then select one or multiple media library folders (Music-Preferences-Library);these folders are then displayed along the /home folder and mounted partitions and external drives. They can be browsed, but there is no context menu nor drag-and-drop for folders: to get files into the current playlist one has to browse down to the audio files. Only then, these can be selected and added to a dedicated playlist. Access to playlists is by going again to View-Playlists; there is no common/parallel display of File browser and playlists, and playlists content is accessible only when selected (no parallel playlists like in tabs)
For KDE - Kaffeine - the KDE media player. I was pleasantly surprised how thoroughly this player is satisfying the demands of my question. In KDE it looks better because it is better integrated with the KDE appearance. In KDE it seems integrated with Dolphin file manager, but it will work very well in other environments and will bring an integrated file manager feature. Without Dolphin some secondary (Dolphin-specific) features, like preview play/view will be disabled, but the most important features are present inside the player, by just selecting the Playlist tab from the left side of the window. In this way it is easy to navigate to the music files and drag and drop them into the playlist.
Pragha can add multiple directories into the library and then accesses it by folder structure. It can display folders with or without the top level by clicking to merge folders or not.
Guayadeque is a bit different. Its file browser is focused on the different directories added to the library, and that would not access all the system by default, but only the paths set by going to View-Preferences-Collections, and there by selecting and/or creating a collection and adding new paths. This is an advantage, as useless directories are thus not visible. Playlists are accessible by selecting My Music and then the Playlist view.
Decibel is more similar to QuodLibet, in that it has no playlists (tabbed or otherwise). By default, its file browser has a two-option switch between displaying whole folders ("root") or only Home folder, but these can be edited, folders can be added or removed as indicated in the other answer, namely here.
I still keep the music in genre and (optionally) sub- and sub-sub-genre folders, but all querying and organisation is done by tags. With a sufficiently powerful searching capability, all my use-cases are solved, and I can now manipulate the library in far more ways than folders alone. Admittedly, though, viewing the hierarchy is much less pretty.
Instead of importing all your music, you can navigate the folder structure in the side pain and then drag and drop the selected folder into the main pain and start playing your music straightaway (see the first screenshot). Decibel is designed to provide a very simple and convenient method of retaining the folder structure of your music and it allows you to find what you want very quickly and easily.
If you have any problems in navigating your folders, check that your home folder is listed in decibel's explorer by going to preferences > explorer and clicking file explorer (see screenshot 2 and 3 below) and adding it if necessary (see screenshot 3).
Apart from the facts that it can access the music library as file browser (and see folder structure), and that it is easy to change the music library directory (e.g. to a subfolder), I recommend Banshee above all other music players, for one simple reason:
While it is possible to create new playlists or compilation albums by first copying tracks to another (e.g. work-in-progress) folder (using the file manager) then importing them and editing the track information with other music players, in my experience it is only Banshee that fully updates the track metadata, file name, and folder name, so that it shows up in all other music players including personal/portable music players. (Caveat: the only exception is .wav files, which cannot be fully edited, although the edited metadata does show up in Banshee itself).
Clicking the file in Astro browser doesn't open the file in a player fully but only a popup preview window. It's in the foreground, doesn't offer many controls and stops playing when the focus is removed.
Music apps I tried were Fusion, Bubble UPNP and the Samsung Music App. All of which seem to rely on some internal media index. Frustratingly I can't simply browse to the file from inside the apps, I have to search the library.
It would be great if it were like Windows or osx and allow the user to "Open with... ", and then select the app. I know you can dig in and change this, but it's a more permanent solution for a temporary requirement.
It's mp3, and plays in the popup player just fine. Perhaps the tags are corrupted and somehow blocking it from appearing in the library. I tried an mp3 tag utility and it can't see the file in the folder. So perhaps it is corrupt in some way.
If it doesn't turn up in the library even after a reboot (which should definitely have triggered the media scanner to add it to the library), the only reason I can think of is some .nomedia file being in the path. You can try to analyze that (finding whether there is one), or...
There are media players not using the library, mainly for FolderPlay & AudioBooks. Using one of those, you can navigate to that folder from within the app, and play the files. If that doesn't work either, the files might be corrupted or using an unsupported format.
in my opinion Emby is the best option to host a personal media server and I think many might agree, that one of it's outstanding features is the performance in terms of streaming. Also, Emby doesn't have as much bloatware, which i.e. Plex does. It's not as fancy or probably not visually as appealing as Plex, but it has most of the features that really matter, rather than features that nobody needs or uses.
However, I think one big flaw is the current (Not so current, eh?) state of the music library, its performance and its features. Please read the following with knowing that it's a subjective point of view, but there might be others agreeing.
While Plex music libraries probably evolved into the probably best music experience for audiophiles, Emby's music experience is several quantum leaps behind.
Things that would drastically improve the music experience on Emby - still very subjective - would be:
- Improve metadata matching. Large music libraries (50.000 songs and above) feel the real pain of 20-35% of artists not being matched correctly or rather not at all
- Music player overhaul. The player looks clunky, outdated, is featureless and even worse: Even lacks essential rudimental features almost every music player has since 2015. Sidenote and not to trigger anybody, but to be honest it reminds me of a visually less appealing version of Winamp from 2002. Features like "smart shuffle", "accoustical analysis", "smart(er) playlists" or at least "smart suggestions" is just a quick idea of features it could have. While Plex has introduced AI into their standard repertoire, Emby doesn't have a "repeat 1 song" feature in their music player web app...
- Media presentation rework. Rather than throwing everything into one clotted spot (like albums at once in 1 overview, songs at once in 1 overview), differentiate between Albums, Compilations, Live Albums, Singles, etc. as I proposed here
Please consider this as one of the bigger feature requests, but over all I'm still very happy with Emby. It's outperforming others in most areas, but the state of music libraries - and I'm talking about libs with more than 100 albums - is my biggest arch enemy and which is the only reason I keep my music on Plex exclusively without creating a music library on Emby.
Thank you for all the hard work over the past decades, which always dragged me back to Emby, coming to find that it might lack one or two things, but is still the best option compared to the competition.
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