12 ms·

Plexamp, standalone music player that can play any music format

36 points by vidyesh 9y ago

sbashwin 9y ago
Just used this and I personally felt it's simple and great! Very easy to search for a track and play them.
LeoPanthera 9y ago
> We quickly settled on Electron as a platform to build the app. Ah yes, because when I want to play music, my first thought is, "doing it inside an entire web browser engine is the logical choice". It's especially bad that they're comparing it to WinAmp. WinAmp was in part popular because it was extremely minimal and resource-light. I'm so sick of electron apps. My battery hates them. My processor hates them. I hate them. Maybe give cmus a try, which is almost the literal opposite of an electron app: https://cmus.github.io https://cmus.github.io
- hrktb 9y ago
  I felt you had a very good point until I went with all my hopes to the cmus page. So it’s *nix only (no supported GUI on other platforms) And that’s why Plexamp is based on electron, as OSX and Windows support comes basically free. To be clear I’m not dissing cmus, just that it’s not the same target as Plexamp and each choices make sense.
  - mhd 9y ago
    Because there are no cross-platform options between 70s terminal apps and The Whole Internet(tm)? I mean, this basically seems to be a mpd client, so the difficult work has mostly been done already. But I guess a big draw of the webtechstack is that it's easier for a lot of people to do fancy animations (like the mentioned equalizer) and all the blinkenlights. Which is interesting in the WinAmp context, as amongst the things that drew people to it were two things: Small size & fancy UI...
    - pjc50 9y ago
      Usable cross-platform options? Not really, as we can tell by the dearth of popular cross-platform apps. I remember there was a great Cambrian explosion of music players back in the Napster era, especially on Linux. It seemed to me that the availability of good non-pirate managed options like iTunes and later Spotify gradually killed off standalone players. Maybe they're coming back into fashion.
      - mhd 9y ago
        I'd say that there's a dearth of desktop apps, creating them in a cross-platform way is easy enough. Not that the situation got a whole lot better, but if you're doing web UX i.e. don't give a damn about native UI guidelines anyway, minor deviations that UI toolkits introduce pale in comparison. And yeah, I think there were three waves of sound apps on Linux: mp3s becoming commmon/computers fast enough (mid-90s), Amarok switching UIs and everyone writing a retro-replacement and recently music moving into the clouds, thus requiring players that connect to Spotify et al.
  - xrisk 9y ago
    cmus runs in a terminal, there is no “GUI”. It also works fine on macOS and Cygwin (Windows).
  - maturz 9y ago
    I you want something for Windows check out https://www.foobar2000.org/ https://www.foobar2000.org/
    - wst_ 9y ago
      Yes, yes and again yes. I am missing it on other platforms so much.
  - LeoPanthera 9y ago
    cmus works just great on Windows and macOS.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  I used winamp on a pentium i mmx 166 MHz laptop. Using electron while mentionong winamp is sacrilege.
peterburkimsher 9y ago
I'm a heavy user of iTunes 10.6.3. The old interface is beautiful, and it syncs music/contacts/calendars to my iPhone and iPod over USB without needing iCloud. Next year I'm planning to rewrite iTunes as a personal project. Essential features for me are: - Multiple libraries - Tags - Playlists - Playlist folders - Sync - AppleScript - Mini player I use iTunes as a general database manager, not only for music. I have a library for Facebook friends, where each person is stored as URL track. Clicking on the track triggers a PHP script, which opens my browser with their profile. I also have other databases for Raspberry Pi projects, universities & departments, SMS text messages, and Chinese characters (a script on that library is what became https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io ). Before I start this huge project, could anyone tell me about alternatives? I've looked into FileMaker, Access, SQL, MongoDb, etc, but nothing has the ease of use, nested playlist folders, and scriptability of iTunes.
- shakna 9y ago
  Well of your essential features, the only one lacking in Amarok would be AppleScript, though you can still write scripts for Amarok in QTScript, which is fairly similar to JavaScript. [0] (Amarok runs on Linux, Windows and macOS). For what you're using it for, I'd probably using SQLite, and a mix of DB Browser for SQLite [1], which is kinda like Excel for SQL. DB Browser can also export records to file. So if you had something like watch running on a folder, you can trigger a script as soon as that happens. My vague thought process: DB Browser entry: kind entry play? music KickassSongILike You click KickASSSongILike, and type y in the play box. A Python script, called by watch watching the db, sees the change and uses something like mp123 to play the file. When it's done, or rather when the process for mp123 stops, so you can stop a song playing, it changes play? back to 'n'. But honestly, you'd do a lot better just building it as a GUI app from scratch. Easiest would be Python, which comes with Tk for graphics, and SQLite for database. Probably a weekend to get you 3/4, and then... Well it depends on the hard parts. The hard parts are: * Sync. Sync with what? And how does that thing officially support extensions? Or what workarounds are currently used instead? * AppleScript. AS doesn't get much love anymore, even from Apple. Integrating it isn't an easy thing. As a way to explain how simple most of this is, I'll explain it in terms of SQL: * Multiple libraries = Multiple tables. * Tags = A second table, filled with tags, that you query via JOIN. * Playlists = A second table that references primary keys of individual song records. * Sync = Compare last-updated fields between backup db and current db, then using developer API to update your sync service. [0] https://amarok.kde.org/en https://amarok.kde.org/en [1] http://sqlitebrowser.org/ http://sqlitebrowser.org/
_ZeD_ 9y ago
Sooo... they build an mpd client? cool, it's ages I toyed with ncmpc and QMPDClient
SnazzZG 9y ago
Looks pretty, but I don't need yet another app with it's hooks into my social media/email etc.
Hamuko 9y ago
>We quickly settled on Electron as a platform to build the app. I guess the "small" only refers to the window size and not to the resource usage. Even the application bundle size is 160 megabytes. Holy fucking shit.
- Veratyr 9y ago
  Considering that MPD, which is doing the actual music playing, is only 13MB (https://www.musicpd.org/download/win32/0.20.13/ https://www.musicpd.org/download/win32/0.20.13/), yeah, it seems crazy that this bundle is 160MB. Electron doesn't even have any inclination to fix it: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/2003 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/2003 They could even probably use Chromium Embedded Framework, which is usually ~40MB and get a decent improvement. The binary would only be 4x the necessary size rather than 10x then.
gregman1 9y ago
Electron for a music player? It's like using matlab as a text editor. Absolutely stupid.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  Spotify is also electron :/
  - la_oveja 9y ago
    Spotify is a website, that uses web services. If I want to listen to my local music, I don't need a browser. It's just plain stupid.
    - magicalhippo 9y ago
      PlexAmp is meant to play music from your Plex library, which may indeed not be local. The Plex server API is HTTP based (something REST-like IIRC). And they wanted the player to work on multiple platforms, unlike say Foobar2000. Not saying it's the best technical choice, but given that it started as a personal side project it's a hardly fair to call it "plain stupid" to use Electron for this.
      - solarkraft 9y ago
        Yet it doesn't even support Linux.
        magicalhippo 9y ago
        That could be because the devs simply don't use Linux as a desktop OS. Again, this was a side project after all. Given that both MPD and Electron has Linux support, PlexAmp will get it soon enough now that it has been released to a wider audience and hopefully gets more internal support.
      - pmlnr 9y ago
        > And they wanted the player to work on multiple platforms, unlike say Foobar2000. You mean something like VLC, mplayer, clementine, Quod Libet, [insert another massive amount of players based on gtk, python, qt, etc.]? Something tells me Electron is not the only choice.
ferongr 9y ago
Those people really want to appear on that n-gate dude's website.
solarkraft 9y ago
> Literally the only requirement we had was “small” ... ... ... ... ... ... > We quickly settled on Electron The reason Plexamp "can play any format" is that it's a client for mpd. While it's insanely bloated for what it does (Winamp became popular for exactly the opposite), it does look like a very good implementation of the concept visually. Especially satisfying when you always see very good music player concepts on dribbble, but none of them are actually implemented.

36 points by vidyesh 9y ago

Just used this and I personally felt it's simple and great! Very easy to search for a track and play them.

> We quickly settled on Electron as a platform to build the app. Ah yes, because when I want to play music, my first thought is, "doing it inside an entire web browser engine is the logical choice". It's especially bad that they're comparing it to WinAmp. WinAmp was in part popular because it was extremely minimal and resource-light. I'm so sick of electron apps. My battery hates them. My processor hates them. I hate them. Maybe give cmus a try, which is almost the literal opposite of an electron app: https://cmus.github.io https://cmus.github.io

hrktb 9y ago
I felt you had a very good point until I went with all my hopes to the cmus page. So it’s *nix only (no supported GUI on other platforms) And that’s why Plexamp is based on electron, as OSX and Windows support comes basically free. To be clear I’m not dissing cmus, just that it’s not the same target as Plexamp and each choices make sense.
- mhd 9y ago
  Because there are no cross-platform options between 70s terminal apps and The Whole Internet(tm)? I mean, this basically seems to be a mpd client, so the difficult work has mostly been done already. But I guess a big draw of the webtechstack is that it's easier for a lot of people to do fancy animations (like the mentioned equalizer) and all the blinkenlights. Which is interesting in the WinAmp context, as amongst the things that drew people to it were two things: Small size & fancy UI...
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Usable cross-platform options? Not really, as we can tell by the dearth of popular cross-platform apps. I remember there was a great Cambrian explosion of music players back in the Napster era, especially on Linux. It seemed to me that the availability of good non-pirate managed options like iTunes and later Spotify gradually killed off standalone players. Maybe they're coming back into fashion.
    - mhd 9y ago
      I'd say that there's a dearth of desktop apps, creating them in a cross-platform way is easy enough. Not that the situation got a whole lot better, but if you're doing web UX i.e. don't give a damn about native UI guidelines anyway, minor deviations that UI toolkits introduce pale in comparison. And yeah, I think there were three waves of sound apps on Linux: mp3s becoming commmon/computers fast enough (mid-90s), Amarok switching UIs and everyone writing a retro-replacement and recently music moving into the clouds, thus requiring players that connect to Spotify et al.
- xrisk 9y ago
  cmus runs in a terminal, there is no “GUI”. It also works fine on macOS and Cygwin (Windows).
- maturz 9y ago
  I you want something for Windows check out https://www.foobar2000.org/ https://www.foobar2000.org/
  - wst_ 9y ago
    Yes, yes and again yes. I am missing it on other platforms so much.
- LeoPanthera 9y ago
  cmus works just great on Windows and macOS.
pmlnr 9y ago
I used winamp on a pentium i mmx 166 MHz laptop. Using electron while mentionong winamp is sacrilege.

peterburkimsher 9y ago

I'm a heavy user of iTunes 10.6.3. The old interface is beautiful, and it syncs music/contacts/calendars to my iPhone and iPod over USB without needing iCloud. Next year I'm planning to rewrite iTunes as a personal project. Essential features for me are: - Multiple libraries - Tags - Playlists - Playlist folders - Sync - AppleScript - Mini player I use iTunes as a general database manager, not only for music. I have a library for Facebook friends, where each person is stored as URL track. Clicking on the track triggers a PHP script, which opens my browser with their profile. I also have other databases for Raspberry Pi projects, universities & departments, SMS text messages, and Chinese characters (a script on that library is what became https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io ). Before I start this huge project, could anyone tell me about alternatives? I've looked into FileMaker, Access, SQL, MongoDb, etc, but nothing has the ease of use, nested playlist folders, and scriptability of iTunes.

shakna 9y ago
Well of your essential features, the only one lacking in Amarok would be AppleScript, though you can still write scripts for Amarok in QTScript, which is fairly similar to JavaScript. [0] (Amarok runs on Linux, Windows and macOS). For what you're using it for, I'd probably using SQLite, and a mix of DB Browser for SQLite [1], which is kinda like Excel for SQL. DB Browser can also export records to file. So if you had something like watch running on a folder, you can trigger a script as soon as that happens. My vague thought process: DB Browser entry: kind entry play? music KickassSongILike You click KickASSSongILike, and type y in the play box. A Python script, called by watch watching the db, sees the change and uses something like mp123 to play the file. When it's done, or rather when the process for mp123 stops, so you can stop a song playing, it changes play? back to 'n'. But honestly, you'd do a lot better just building it as a GUI app from scratch. Easiest would be Python, which comes with Tk for graphics, and SQLite for database. Probably a weekend to get you 3/4, and then... Well it depends on the hard parts. The hard parts are: * Sync. Sync with what? And how does that thing officially support extensions? Or what workarounds are currently used instead? * AppleScript. AS doesn't get much love anymore, even from Apple. Integrating it isn't an easy thing. As a way to explain how simple most of this is, I'll explain it in terms of SQL: * Multiple libraries = Multiple tables. * Tags = A second table, filled with tags, that you query via JOIN. * Playlists = A second table that references primary keys of individual song records. * Sync = Compare last-updated fields between backup db and current db, then using developer API to update your sync service. [0] https://amarok.kde.org/en https://amarok.kde.org/en [1] http://sqlitebrowser.org/ http://sqlitebrowser.org/

_ZeD_ 9y ago

Sooo... they build an mpd client? cool, it's ages I toyed with ncmpc and QMPDClient

SnazzZG 9y ago

Looks pretty, but I don't need yet another app with it's hooks into my social media/email etc.

Hamuko 9y ago

>We quickly settled on Electron as a platform to build the app. I guess the "small" only refers to the window size and not to the resource usage. Even the application bundle size is 160 megabytes. Holy fucking shit.

Veratyr 9y ago
Considering that MPD, which is doing the actual music playing, is only 13MB (https://www.musicpd.org/download/win32/0.20.13/ https://www.musicpd.org/download/win32/0.20.13/), yeah, it seems crazy that this bundle is 160MB. Electron doesn't even have any inclination to fix it: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/2003 https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/2003 They could even probably use Chromium Embedded Framework, which is usually ~40MB and get a decent improvement. The binary would only be 4x the necessary size rather than 10x then.

gregman1 9y ago

Electron for a music player? It's like using matlab as a text editor. Absolutely stupid.

pmlnr 9y ago
Spotify is also electron :/
- la_oveja 9y ago
  Spotify is a website, that uses web services. If I want to listen to my local music, I don't need a browser. It's just plain stupid.
  - magicalhippo 9y ago
    PlexAmp is meant to play music from your Plex library, which may indeed not be local. The Plex server API is HTTP based (something REST-like IIRC). And they wanted the player to work on multiple platforms, unlike say Foobar2000. Not saying it's the best technical choice, but given that it started as a personal side project it's a hardly fair to call it "plain stupid" to use Electron for this.
    - solarkraft 9y ago
      Yet it doesn't even support Linux.
      - magicalhippo 9y ago
        That could be because the devs simply don't use Linux as a desktop OS. Again, this was a side project after all. Given that both MPD and Electron has Linux support, PlexAmp will get it soon enough now that it has been released to a wider audience and hopefully gets more internal support.
    - pmlnr 9y ago
      > And they wanted the player to work on multiple platforms, unlike say Foobar2000. You mean something like VLC, mplayer, clementine, Quod Libet, [insert another massive amount of players based on gtk, python, qt, etc.]? Something tells me Electron is not the only choice.

ferongr 9y ago

Those people really want to appear on that n-gate dude's website.

solarkraft 9y ago

> Literally the only requirement we had was “small” ... ... ... ... ... ... > We quickly settled on Electron The reason Plexamp "can play any format" is that it's a client for mpd. While it's insanely bloated for what it does (Winamp became popular for exactly the opposite), it does look like a very good implementation of the concept visually. Especially satisfying when you always see very good music player concepts on dribbble, but none of them are actually implemented.