a few days ago, my favourite music player, muine, suddenly stopped working. this probably because of the recent upgrade to mono 2.0 and the 2.24 c# libs.

the muine project seems to be dead too: no mails on the mailing list, no project page updates and the only commits are either translation updates or some small bugfixes by wouter "no-i-wont-let-muine-die" bolsterlee.

therefore i spent the last days looking out for a nice music player. and it seems that there is no single music player that i liked. to be honest: they all suck. every single one of them. most of those players include things like podcasts, internet radio, browsing by genre, managing multiple playlists, burning cds, cd ripping, lyrics support, database searches, brewing coffee and giving ones shoes a shine.

why should i need all this? just because every other music player has those (and much more) features, everyone else has to join and has to overload his software with totally useless things. yeah i know, the users say "how could you dare to give out a player, who cant listen to podcasts, watch videos, burn cds and feed my dog? dont you listen to your users?"

it seems like everyone listens too much to those feature requests, and most of them are useless anyway. now please have a look around, every music app has gazillions of features and not one does it right. every player gets loaded with tons of features on every release. you know for sure some products, which were developed to death exactly this way.

muine is just ingenious, with its brilliant user interface. the search based album/song window works extremely well for finding quickly the songs you want to listen to. the single playlist model is fast, easy and doesnt suck. it discovers new/changes music files fast and painless. it automatically looks for cover art if not present in the album directories (yes, most of the players out there fail to do even that). and with muine-shell, you can even remote control it by dbus, ir or whatever you want. but yeah, muine sucks because you cant burn cds, watch videos, download podcasts, browses by genre and so on. but please remember, that there are better tools for those jobs. remember what was said about unix?

this is the unix philosophy: write programs that do one thing and do it well.

if you are able to get muine running, please use it for a few weeks and you will see what i mean. muine got it right, most other tools did get nothing wrong, as nat said some time ago. thanks for reading.

update 1: the theme i used for the screenshot is called kin dust

update 2: i already tried out muinshee and it looks nice, but i think it isnt ready for production yet. if you compare muinshee and muine directly, you definitely will spot some differences, which i do not like at the moment.