Why are all music players (on Mac) so useless?

[Hink]

I didn't realise there was a Mac version but as I recall the Windows version didn't have a proper file browser and you had to add an extension to add one, which isn't for Mac

http://winampheritage.com/mlplugin/inde ... umlp-about

I have been using winamp forever with no add ons (but I am using a pc), I'm not sure what you're looking for for a browser but one of my complaints would be by default it has too many browser windows.

[aMUSEd]

I didn't realise there was a Mac version but as I recall the Windows version didn't have a proper file browser and you had to add an extension to add one, which isn't for Mac

http://winampheritage.com/mlplugin/inde ... umlp-about

I have been using winamp forever with no add ons (but I am using a pc), I'm not sure what you're looking for for a browser but one of my complaints would be by default it has too many browser windows.

From what I can see none of those are an actual file browser though, and many sub panes seem to be displaying the same thing (I presume you can probably reduce those greatly). The problem is most music players these days work on assumption that people buy music online all correctly tagged with pretty pictures etc, but forget about those of us who ripped our own CD collections to FLAC way before iTunes was even around using whatever tool was at hand, so none of it has the sort of tags that almost all these browsers rely on to organise stuff (in most cases I just gave each file the name of the track and a number so it would play in the proper order, albums were grouped using subfolders, which were then grouped by composer or artist and finally by broad category of music). So I need a player with a proper file manager, I do not care what genre etc someone has assigned my track to, and not one of these gets things like composer right anyway so it's best ignored.

[xNiMiNx]

The winamp Jump to search box searches both file name and tags. If your track has a tag, that name will appear in the list, if it doesnt, it shows up as the file name (minus file extension). Along with all that, you can queue up songs from that window.



(no songs are listed in this example image because the user has no songs with a filename or tag containing the word 'sample')

Between the main Winamp window and Playlist editor, i keep everything else closed and never use it (like in hinks screenshot), and just bring up the Jump To when i need to find something, or set up a temp playlist order.

[aMUSEd]

I have found a music player that fulfils one of my criteria at least:

http://www.blackomega.co.uk/index.html

this one plays everything back perfectly through my hifi via HDMI, really excellent support for surround too, the sound quality is miles better than any other player I've tried. Just doesn't have a browser, I have asked the dev if he can add one, in the meantime I'll just have to use it in combination with Finder.

Brownie points for the neat Babylon5 reference too

[Jace-BeOS]

BeOS was a great OS for mp3 libraries. The file system browser was all you needed because of its database-like design. The available players were acceptable.

Of course, there's no way I could recommend that today! Hah hah...

iTunes annoys me in some ways but I manage to stick with it. I manage my mp3 files manually and you have to tell iTunes to let you do that. Also, the tags are not a reliable way to organize content, so I almost only ever use playlists, organized in playlist folders. Trying to rely on iTunes to show me stuff organized by tags is often frustrating (any slight change in artist name, for example, or the way multidisc albums are handled, let alone mp3 library content from the web).

I don't output to any other devices at the moment and I don't find flac to be so much better than max quality mp3 or lossless m4a (certainly not a better file size, and I'm limited to about 20gigs on my iPhone), so file type support means little to me anymore.

Sorry I have no suggestions other than manually creating playlists and setting iTunes to manual file management.