I encourage anyone with a local music collection to go download Zune and give it a try.
Zune never took off because it came too late and was going against a market already dominated by the iPod, and Metro was hated since Microsoft shoved it down the throats of desktop users with Windows 8, even though it was wonderful to use on tablets, except Windows tablets of the time sucked major ballsack since they were powered by anemic Intel Atom CPUs trying to run a full desktop OS compared to the ARM iPads running a mobile OS.
When all the news and talks are about this iPod killer from Microsoft and then Apple themselves release a truly groundbreaking iPod killer themselves, you look foolish. Zune really got done in by marketing.
The Xbox was somewhat of an anomaly owing to exclusives like Halo and Gears of War, but it's floundering, and in some countries, like Japan, it's just never taken off, period.
Apple Vision doesn't seem to be a sensation in terms of sales figures, despite the HoloLens beating Apple to the punch, and the stereotypical nonsense being "Apple is always late, but they always do it right". HoloLens just got killed along with Windows Mixed Reality.
Hell, even the Microsoft Band beat the Apple Watch to market.
The problem is that merely having a presence in a niche doesn't guarantee success as it once did. Now, you need to actually iterate, innovate, and satisfy the minimum expected threshold of solving real problems. This is also what Tim Cook's Apple struggles with these days.
What's the killer app for Apple Vision? What was it for HoloLens?
When digital technology was new and exciting, having anything would draw buyers. Now, we're spoiled for choice, things move fast, it isn't years between models, it's months to a year. Early adopters tend to get a bad experience too.
That doesn’t happen often.
Microsoft is more towards licensing software to make money versus making a quality product top down.
https://archive.org/details/zune-package_202204 https://archive.org/details/zunepackage_4.8.2345.0
It's also a fun way to check on what I was listening to back then. A little trip down memory lane.
Thanks to the awesome flutter_rust_bridge it’s very easy to use them together and leverage both their strengths.
That was the main reason I started my own music player project (https://github.com/albertz/music-player). But it never really got to the point to have a more advanced variant of this features. The best it could do is randomly play through directories, but at least prefer liked songs. I implemented the core playing engine in C++ and the remaining logic in Python, as I thought that would give me most flexibility. Unfortunately I haven't found the time to work on it since a while.
Nevertheless, Rune might offer the features you're looking for. It not only provides recommendations based on individual tracks but also on criteria like "songs you've liked," "all music from a specific directory," or "all tracks from a particular album." Additionally, it can categorize recommended tracks into nine sub-lists based on acoustic features, helping you find the perfect arrangement.
Thanks to its separation of front-end and back-end, Rune can be used independently of a GUI. You can also use Rune's CLI to create M3U playlists. While these features haven't been fully refined due to my limited resources, I believe Rune has the potential to meet your expectations in the future.
Here are the document of the query syntax: https://github.com/Losses/rune/blob/master/documents/mix_que...
I hope that once Rune reaches a production-ready state, you'll remember it. I'll be looking forward to that day.
Reading your last commit, it seems like we had the similar idea of wanting more intelligent shuffle. Which is why I made a player that simply ingests plaintext playlists and then https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/mus/tree/75478f90269dca1b69e0d763d... to achieve what I wanted (though I'll probably modify it to avoid queuing albums sharing a primary genres; who wants 3 black metal LPs in a row?).
Here are some comparisons to MPD: https://github.com/albertz/music-player/blob/master/Compare_...
Btw, my music player can even act as a MPD backend.
Writing the backend part was anyway the simpler part. And that covered quite a lot of things: https://github.com/albertz/music-player/blob/master/WhatIsAM...
The GUI turned out to be the trickier part. I wanted to design everything around this infinite play list concept, and that in a cross-platform way, but I didn't really finished that.
We’ve created one of the most amazing values and uses of technology of our lifetimes?
Streaming per month costs so much less than a new CD did 25-30 years ago. And it’s so so so much better than buying a new CD a month.
If the average person keeps paying the (quite small) bill, they can listen to essentially anything they want to listen to (unless they have very peculiar tastes — please do not reply to tell me that the obscure 1907 ragtime classic you need to listen to is not on Spotify).
It’s incredible!
Obvious point about not owning it either, so if an artist or whole label decides to have a fight with your streaming provider, sorry tough luck, you just lost them from your library.
Honestly, the Spotify desktop client is also quite bad. Its feels very sluggish (I'm not sure about its detailed implementation, but it gives me the feeling of a web application). Maybe this level of experience is acceptable for a social media app, but as a music player, its quality is somewhat disappointing to me.
You mean "what have I done".
I’ve recently found myself experimenting with local playback and built https://github.com/xenodium/ready-player
While I used to stream music 100% of the time, that’s now more like 5%, dedicated exclusively to discovery.
These days, I’m now back to purchasing digital music and primarily local playback.
Also I'd like to know more about the interop between Dart/Rust and what the experience is like!
Rune has a built-in media analysis and recommendation system. It extracts dozens of acoustic features from audio, creating a high-dimensional space. Searching for nearby points in this space helps listeners find similar tracks, offering features akin to those on streaming platforms.
While creating a traditional audio player is an option, I wanted to explore something new. That's why I chose Rust for its performance and ecosystem advantages.
Regarding the inter-operation between Dart and Rust, I used a library called `rinf`. They communicate via protobuffer by sending signals to each other, and the experience has been quite smooth.
Short answer: No. It's purely a coincidence. Rune is an abbreviation for Zune Revived, and I only realized this awkward situation today.
Wondering about more power-user features (as someone who did quodlibet -> mpd -> cmus -> my own https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/mus) such as gapless playback, ReplayGain, album instead of track shuffle, IPC and event reporting, possible headless mode, integration with projectM, etc...
