I use Windows XP Pro at work, and I like to play music whenever I’m actually at my desk. There are a lot of different programs to choose from that can play my collection of MP3s, and I’ve used a lot of them over time. I used to use Winamp exclusively (see old story on this site), but their advertising gimmicks through via internet since they were purchased by AOL is annoying to say the least, and I never liked the playlist management in Winamp. Recent versions of Winamp added a ‘media library’ window sort of like what iTunes has, but yet another window floating around (Winamp already had three if you count the player, the equalizer, and the playlist thing) was just the last straw. I’ve used iTunes for several years now, mainly because that’s what I used on the Mac, more than out of any real thought that it was superior in some way. As software goes, it certainly *is* superior - and in many ways, but that’s not really the point of this post! For all iTunes really good points, it has some major detractions for me. It’s a big, bloated program for one, gobbling up many megabytes of my precious Ram. It’s also a bit of a CPU hog (though it’s really not all that bad considering the power it gives you to manipulate your music in real time (the party shuffle is one of my favorite pieces of iTunes). iTunes makes it very easy to work with MP3 tags as well, but more on that later.

Recently I discovered what might be my new favorite Music player - musikCube (mC). An open source project released under the BSD license, mC immediately gains my respect because I prefer using open source software to proprietary software whenever possible, though that is a philosophical argument for another day. mC is not flashy, it doesn’t have a ’skinnable’ appearance like Winamp, though you *can* adjust the colors of the interface to suit your personal taste (I like light text on a dark background for instance), and it doesn’t look as slick and polished as the iTunes juggernaut, but it does *almost* everything I want my music player to do, and it does it very fast. Opening mC is nearly immediate on my P4 dual core, while iTunes takes a few moments to load up, load it’s database, and finally become useable. Instead of an XML backend like iTunes, mC uses SQLite, a real SQL engine! This makes mC much faster when serving up the same (huge) amount of audio files and information about them. You can create ’smart playlists’ in mC (as iTunes refers to them), which are lists of songs generated on the fly, based on criteria the user defines through a properly formatted SQL string! This might be intimidating to folks who aren’t used to writing SQL queries (my experience with Oracle has inured me to this), but SQL is so straightforward (and powerful) that it’s worth learning about. I like the fact that I can keep my music filed wherever I want and mC doesn’t try to shuffle it around (though you can choose this behavior with iTunes also), and I can set mC to watch directories for changes so that if I move or remove files mC will automatically update it’s database to point to their new locations (*unlike* iTunes on Windows, though this works fine on the Mac version). I can still play my Internet radio stations (like Live Ireland and WUSB) as long as the URL is not a .pls file (it works if the URL is put in as an IP:port). The database seems to be abstracted from the music files somehow as well - I haven’t confirmed this yet, but I have read-only access to some music files on a shared server, and I can modify tag information about these files (or at least in the database referring to them) such that my library of music has the information about the files that *I* want. I updated a lot of genre fields today in mC while I haven’t ever been able to ‘correct’ this info in iTunes since I don’t have write access to the files themselves.

There are some things missing in mC. It’s only available for Windows? What kind of open source program is only available for Windows?! Hold on - RTFM I guess, there *is* a Linux version called MusikBox. There is no podcast support, and since I tune into a bunch of podcasts regularly I wouldn’t be able to use mC as my sole player. No album artwork support. It doesn’t play DRM protected music, but thats not really a problem for me that much. If I have any, I usually burn them to a rewritable disc and then rip them into open formats.

At home I’ve been using mp3blaster (a console application written with ncurses that I compiled on the Mac) lately instead of iTunes, and discovered that MP3 tags are not as simple as I thought they were. As is the case with most standards, the format of the MP3 tag has evolved over time. It took a little investigation to find out why mp3blaster wasn’t showing correct / any id3 tag info, I thought it was just broken at first! It turns out that an MP3 file can have one or both types of id3 tags. (NOTE: this is NOT true of OGG, WMA, AAC, or WAV files which either have their own format, proprietary formats, or no support for tags). The original ID3 standard (version 1 from 1996) was popular for car stereos and the like, and only shows a few pieces of track info, and limits the number of characters per field to max 30. The other, (version 2.3) is the current and probably most popular standard which allows for a lot of different fields, and at a longer field length (so you can type long album names and such). Playing your music in a player that doesn’t support one of the tagging standards will display limited or no information about a file and cause much grief. There are softwares that can be employed to write the appropriate information to the other format (and append it to the MP3 file) either by looking the information up on the internet, or by copying the information from the other format. As most of my music is in MP3 and tagged in this newer format, much of it is missing id3v1 tags as a result. Processing all my files to have the older id3v1 standard info (and keeping them in sync) is daunting.