Advantages of sorted lists include:

• one can easily find the first n elements (e.g. the 5 smallest countries) and the last n elements (e.g. the 3 largest countries)
• one can easily find the elements in a given range (e.g. countries with an area between .. and .. square km)
• one can easily search for an element, and conclude whether it is in the list

The first two advantages are things you almost never need to do with music libraries. And the third has been supplanted by now-ubiquitous search boxes: if you know what you’re looking for, you search; and if you don’t, an alphabetized list is not the way to find it.

Web visionary Ted Nelson (<mst3k>Dr. Ted Nelson?</mst3k>) has been paraphrased as pointing out that “electronic documents have been designed to mimic their paper antecedents,” and that “this is where everything went wrong: electronic documents could and should behave entirely differently from paper ones.” If the folder metaphor is inadequate for digital documents, no wonder it’s so pitiful at handling music. The proximity between pieces of music in a library should least of all be based on the first letter in a band’s name — it’s as arbitrary as sorting them by the vocalist’s month of birth — yet this is how it’s universally done.

Music library organization needs to be re-thought from the ground up. We need to consider how it is that people used to listen to music before it was all on their iTunes. How are your CDs organized (or disorganized) on your shelf? How are they organized in your head? What is it that prompts you to listen to what you listen to when you listen to it? And how can we use computers to adopt and enhance these ways of thinking, rather than forcing us to think like computers?

The most natural method for organizing music (if you can escape alphabetical thinking for a moment) is by similarity. Last.fm does this, and it is invaluable. When you are at an artist’s page at Last.fm, you feel that you are in that artist’s “neighborhood,” with links to similar bands, tags, listeners, and related groups. The Last.fm architecture was designed to manifest organic, bottom-up communities around bands and genres. This is an experience that cannot currently be replicated in any music player, at least not easily (with the possible exception of Amarok). But because Last.fm’s data is extraordinarily accessible, there are virtually no obstacles to incorporating this sense of “musical neighborhoods” into a piece of software.

If you don’t already have an artist in mind whose neighborhood you’d like to browse, you probably at least have some idea of the kind of mood you’re after, and there are several approaches here. One (perhaps the least viable) is using Last.fm’s tags. These are actually less often concerned with mood than they are with genre, a taxonomy well-known as being inconsistent and, I would argue, misguided: When I want to listen to Lullatone, it’s not because I want to listen to electronic music; it’s because I want to listen to “whimsical,” “delicate,” “innocent,” “sparkling” music. Who cares what genre it is?

AllMediaGuide began a project called Tapestry some time ago, an application of their vast mood/situation/genre dataset. It is an ideal solution for browsing music, and its integration into desktop software would be hugely rewarding. It’s possible to simulate Tapestry with foobar2000 and some elbow grease, but the results are not as robust as they could be.

Again, if you already know what you’re looking for, it would be difficult to find it through these channels; but this is what search is for.

We also need to consider the less objective and more personal reasons that music becomes relevant in specific contexts, analogously to the way in which CDs become disordered on one’s shelf. I, for instance, usually have about 20 albums littering the top of my receiver and speakers. These include, roughly, (a) stuff I just bought, (b) stuff I just listened to, and (c) stuff I haven’t bothered putting away because I know I’ll listen to it again soon.

The main obstacle to browsing in this way is a prevalent shortcoming whose symptoms are far-reaching: the fact that music players “think” in terms of songs, not in terms of albums — or even in terms of artists, for that matter: My music software doesn’t know that these 38 songs are all by Electrelane; it just knows that their artist metadata is alphabetically adjacent. Sure, you can sort iTunes libraries by data such as “last listened” and “added”; and you can use CoverFlow to simulate a pale approximation of a flesh-and-blood record collection; but the only way you can sort albums or artists is alphabetically. I’ve written about the ways in which MP3Toys addresses this problem, and it remains a commendable pioneer in music management, but its difficulties (a steep learning curve, a buggy interface, a rapid release schedule) outweigh its advantages.

Browsing your own music library is a very impersonal experience, despite enormous potential for personalization. Rich info visualization “toys” such as Last.fm Extra Stats and LastGraph are seen as novelties, but would, in fact, be revolutionary as library browsing environments. There is nothing to prevent this from development, either; even users who are not plugged into Last.fm could have their listening history stored locally by their music software, which could then be used to generate small, cached, infinite-resolution SVG histograms, browsable by zooming, panning, and clicking. Far from being cumbersome and CPU-intensive, it would actually be rather elegant.

Continuing on the theme of chronology, what about a simple calendar charts view, with varying granularity by day, week, month, quarter? Presentationally, these charts could even be made easily to resemble vertical stacks of CDs, with spine art generated from a cropped cover image and overlaid text. This would arguably be eye-candy, of course, but just imagine how it would “feel” to see your music this way. If there’s one thing Apple’s been consistently right about, it’s that functionality is not at odds with a pleasant user experience, but rather that they are meant to be mutually supportive.

When I was helping to establish some playstamp tagging standards with the foobar community in 2005, it was jokingly suggested that when songs are played they be tagged with the current weather. Despite the sarcasm, I couldn’t help but think, “What a great idea!” I know my listening habits are affected by the weather, and I can’t imagine other people are not the same. There is, after all, a frequently-used “rainy day” tag at Last.fm.

What about a histogram based not on play count, but on hotness values over time? What about artist similarity webs based not on Last.fm data, but on proximity of play times within your personal history? What about taking lessons from the DONTCLICK.IT project, BumpTop, and the pile metaphor for unprecedentedly fluid user interfaces?

All the ingredients are there. Everyone is rapidly moving towards an exclusively digital music collection, and the technology is embarrassingly outmoded. Music has become a major component of computing, at levels once reserved for word processing and gaming. Our relationship with our digital music collections is poised for reinvention, a looming difficulty that has been made invisible by custom and habit. Digital music management is hell, and users have complacently accepted this.

The obvious solution at this point is Songbird. Songbird’s media views (present since 0.5) allow more easily than ever for custom browsing environments. Previously the only way to alter your music browsing environment was to switch programs entirely; besides which, nearly all available programs simply mimic the well-known disk/directory views or iTunes’ browser pane view (which is just a glorification of a disk/directory view anyway). Songbird, on the other hand, boasts an unprecedented extensibility, coupled with media attention, ease-of-use, and the Mozilla platform, for which people have been developing extensions for ages (in computer years).

The prospects are thrilling and the potential for innovation is virtually limitless. Promisingly, there are some glimpses of where things might be headed for Songbird media views: Catalogue View demonstrates a novel visual presentation of your library, though it doesn’t do much in the way of organizational presentation; and Metrics Media Page is the beginnings of the kind of infovis view that could be (but currently isn’t) adapted to allow for actual navigation. Nevertheless, I have a bad feeling that this opportunity will be missed, as the status quo continues to obfuscate these possibilities.

There’s always been a significant faction of foobar2000 users whose primary attraction to the player is its appearance, or rather the level of control given to its users over its appearance. In its infancy, with the standard (and still default) UI, very little was possible — the main window consisted solely of a tabbed playlist and several functional toolbars — but people nevertheless took a lot of pride in making it their own, and some impressive things were done with relatively minimal flexibility. It was in the standard UI that users began experimenting with album-level presentation, choosing not to repeat redundantly the artist and album name on each line of the playlist, but to use the second, third, and sometimes fourth lines to display other info, such as year, label, genre, replaygain info, etc. Each of these customizations was unquestionably unique, but most of the broad details of the interface were consistent and inescapable.

The Columns UI component began as an experiment in allowing for multiple columns within the playlist display, emulating the Windows Explorer “Detail” view (and many other Windows programs), with sortability via clickable column headings. Eventually Columns UI added a sidebar and, later, panels, allowing the whole foobar window to be split up indefinitely into panel-based component displays, the playlist viewer becoming just another one of these. This granted much greater flexibility, allowing users to tailor the interface even more precisely to their needs. You could now display album art as prominently as you wanted, or not at all; your entire library tree could be embedded within the main window, rather than tucked away in a pop-up; and with the trackinfo panel’s exceptionally lax (by that era’s standards) stylizations, the personalization of your foobar became even more addictive, and, more importantly, rewarding.

And yet, many (and in increasing number) seemed hell-bent on concocting the most garish presentations imaginable: giant gothic blue-on-black custom fonts, deep-red 200-px-tall spectrum analyzers, all, of course, coupled with custom OS “vis” and the most tasteless collections of death-/black-/speed-metal slash industrial slash deep house techno.

While some still preferred the purity and elegance of the standard UI, the personalizations made possible by Columns UI were inarguably functional ones, for the most part. Fonts, colors, distribution of panels, and a rudimentary method of text alignment were really as far as you could go. At the core of all the boasted screenshots was a recognizable structure, all slight variations on the theme of playlist+trackinfo+albumlist+albumart. Outside of displaying album art, there was nothing profoundly new that Columns UI allowed you to do — rather, Columns UI gave you more control over how you did what you needed to do.

And yet, many (and in increasing number) seemed hell-bent on concocting the most garish presentations imaginable: giant gothic blue-on-black custom fonts, deep-red 200-px-tall spectrum analyzers, all, of course, coupled with custom OS “vis” and the most tasteless collections of death-/black-/speed-metal slash industrial slash deep house techno. For whatever reason, people are attracted to this, and these screenshots rapidly brought more curious foobar novices into the forums, wanting a “cool” music player of their own.

At the time, these people were not in the majority of new enlistees. Many continued to jump on board for the incomparably robust program that was still very much the heart of the foobar community, despite all the dressing up. The occasional rogue thread would crop up, asking questions that had been answered countless times before; the new user would be chastised, sent to another relevant thread, answered directly, or any combination of the three. These occurrences were perennial but negligible, and besides, they fell into the unspoken hierarchy of usership; it was the role of the foobar sophomores to help these people out, because they had only recently been in a similar position.

Foobar2000 was in a state of relative stasis. Version 0.9, the successor to 0.8.3, was released in early 2006; the set of “essential” core components was more or less firmly established, only waiting to be perfected; users tweaked their interfaces, inching ever closer to an asymptotic UI utopia; things were good.

And with that, two seemingly simple components engendered a monumental shift in the way people thought about foobar.

Eventually, the inflexibility of the trackinfo panel began to bother some people, particularly that each instance of a trackinfo panel was limited to one font and size. A user named terrestrial began developing “Track Info Panel Mod,” which allowed for in-panel font changes, as well as the inclusion of images. It was this last feature, images, where things really began to get off track. The freedom to arbitrarily place any image within the foobar window is almost strictly unfunctional, motivated purely by the desire to make foobar look good. The introduction of this component encouraged a shift in mentality about foobar, producing ever more flashy screenshots, and attracting ever more users seeking eye-candy.

As Track Info Panel Mod evolved and grew in popularity, people craved increasingly more control. The functionality was amended hastily, by sloppy, ad hoc revisions of the bizarre, cumbersome formatting language. Still, it was only one component, it had found a niche, and it kept to itself.

A few months later, terrestrial began development on a second component, “Single Column Playlist” (SCPL). This began as a simple attempt to replace Columns UI’s playlist view, which, ironically, is the one thing that Columns UI was originally created for. Rather than a static grid of multiple columns and rows, terrestrial envisioned a blank canvas, much like Track Info Panel Mod (TIPM), upon which images and track info could be laid with almost total freedom. Additionally, SCPL was able to group playlist items into collapsible albums, introducing the kind of album-level handling that had eluded foobar users for so long.

One got the sense that people were beginning to believe that foobar was TIPM/SCPL.

Meanwhile, TIPM had begun to allow foobar commands to be associated with images, so that images in the panel could act as buttons. This was naturally extended to SCPL, and with that, two seemingly simple components engendered a monumental shift in the way people thought about foobar. TIPM and SCPL dominated huge portions of people’s foobar windows; the album art panel was rejected in favor of placing album art in TIPM and SCPL; statusbars, toolbars, and even titlebars were replaced with button-loaded TIPM panels. And with glassy effects everywhere, huge flame backdrops, and iTunes-like album art reflections, older components began to seem just that — old. An albumlist panel, with its Explorer tree appearance, and separated from the prettier panels by gray bars, was no longer acceptable as part of a seamless, highly stylized UI. Were these configurations functional? In some cases, yes, but largely, no — or rather, function was of a distant, secondary concern.

The effects of this were twofold: first, the forums were flooded with people who had seen these screenshots and wanted a decked-out music player to match their translucent, purple-LED-spangled case mods; second, because of TIPM/SCPL’s convoluted new formatting language, foobar’s already notorious learning curve was pitched to unprecedented new heights. Avatar-less users were everywhere, starting new threads with their first post, asking questions about TIPM/SCPL. These questions belonged in the components’ threads, of course, but one got the sense that people were beginning to believe that foobar was TIPM/SCPL.

Inevitably, TIPM and SCPL were merged into one component, Panels UI, which replaces entirely the Columns UI interface: “Panels UI looks and acts like one large Track Info Mod panel (advanced text positioning, multiple font configurations, displaying images, etc.) that can inside of it host new panels.” Alarmingly, a very recent poll shows that, out of 89 foobar users, 42.7% are using Panels UI. And the threads continue to this day:

• panels UI sort problem (quick question)
• few question [sic] about Panels UI
• how do i make a button that will open the menu? (With foo_ui_panels)
• PanelsUI Coding Questions (Questions I Cannot Find Answers To…………)
• and my favorite: please help. panels UI :( (renamed to rocket scientist UI?)

Admittedly, Panels UI is capable of improving foobar’s functionality. If you took the time to develop a real expertise in the formatting language, the look and feel of foobar would be limited only by your imagination. And my suspicion that the graphics-intensive nature of Panels UI places an unjustifiable burden on your system resources has been largely untested (by me). Performance was the reason I got into foobar in the first place, and though I tried Panels UI for a few weeks with mixed results, the more measured, sober approach to foobar development demonstrated by older “essential” components ultimately drew me back to Columns UI, which I am still happily using today.

I do think it would be a wise solution to create a Panels UI section in the foobar forums. These threads are not going away, and never before has a single component spawned so many one-off threads. Unfortunately, the notoriously stubborn forum administrators would never agree to this, as it would violate the even-handedness with which foobar involvement has always been treated — “Why shouldn’t my component have its own forum?”

There is a new blog meant to report foobar news from the forums, but its focus, too, is primarily on Panels UI. But at least its posts are informative and considered, not thoughtless questions from frustrated n00bs, and it does allow and encourage contributions.

This service pack was rumored in November (by Wired and CNET, among others) to offer a 10% boost in speed, but who knows under what conditions it’ll actually be noticeable. And all this amidst protests against Microsoft’s plan to stop selling XP this summer. Even John Dvorak, whose columns I’ve been reading since adolescence, hates Vista:

You’re not supposed to deliver a new operating system that’s been in development for more than four years yet performs worse than the previous OS. Performance should be at the top, not the bottom, of the to-do list. You get the sense that Microsoft just piles code on top of code and somewhere in the middle of it all is MS-DOS 1.0.

I’ll say.

There’s also a new “Media Views” feature, which looks promising. As of now the only add-on to take advantage of this is a simple tag-cloud library view, but I imagine things could get really elaborate there. Their line, “Tired of music players that look like spreadsheets?”, has me anticipating all kinds of innovative browsing environments; picture a navigable mood-cluster terrain, or a pannable, zoomable, clickable history wavegraph. I’m seriously considering teaching myself enough XUL to be able to write a hotness add-on.

Amazingly, 0.1 was first released over two years ago. And their releases have code-names like Bowie and Eno? Who knew.

And on that day…

First I heard that it would resample rather than simply rescale images, as demonstrated in the image above (via Acts of Volition).

Later I learned that it will also render fonts more smoothly. I enjoy the soft way pages look in Safari for Windows, the result of a different rendering engine, WebKit, so this is something I’m really looking forward to. Here’s an example of Cairo’s font rendering, as seen in Camino 1.2+ for Mac, via hicksdesign:

There are very specific reasons for the intentional differences in these approaches to font rendering. It’s a matter of personal preference, and I think my preference will be for Cairo. Some are floored by the superiority of WebKit, and designer Jeffrey Zeldman makes a solid, objective case for it; others are horrified.

Finally, Gecko’s non-standard CSS attribute -moz-border-radius, a precursor to CSS3’s border-radius attribute, will make image-less rounded div corners easy and pretty (via Acts of Volition):

I would have posted screenshots of my own, but I don’t trust these alpha builds not to eff things up.

Anyway I used to use MediaCoder to convert to flash video, but when it gave me errors, and refused to tell me the specifics of those errors, I took it old school to the command prompt with FFmpeg (which MediaCoder uses anyway). This gives you a lot of useful info about the source file you’re encoding, such as audio sampling rate, frame rate, etc.

Wanting to find a balance between picture quality and streamability, I began encoding a short length of AVI video at different compression levels. FFmpeg calls this “qscale” (a way of representing variable bitrate qualities, much like LAME’s -V parameter), and the lower the qscale value, the better the quality. The available qscale values range from 1 (highest quality) to 31 (lowest quality). Going worse than a 13 qscale produces unacceptably poor quality, so that’s as low as I went for the purposes of this test.

I encoded 3:14 minutes of an AVI, resizing it to 500×374 pixels, and encoding the audio at 96kbps and 44.1KHz, which sounds fine, and is a negligible part of the ultimate file size, so going lower wouldn’t be very beneficial. Plus I find that good audio can create the illusion that the whole thing is of higher quality. Poor audio just makes it sound like “web video.”

Here are the results, courtesy of Google Spreadsheets:

The filesize, of course, goes down as quality goes down. And the loss in filesize also decreases, not just in amount, but in percentage as well, as indicated by the red line. For instance, the value of the red line at qscale 3 is 33.97%, which means that in going from qscale 2 to qscale 3, 33.97% of the filesize is shaved off.

However, because these losses are not perfectly exponential, I knew that there had to be qscale values that were more “efficient,” in a sense, than others — values that, despite being high, and causing a lower change in filesize than the previous step in qscale, still caused a comparably large change in filesize. For instance, still looking at the red line, you’ll notice that going from 2 to 3, as I said, shaves off 33.97% of the filesize, while going from 3 to 4 only shaves off 23.93% of the filesize; and that is a 29.56% decrease in change-in-filesize, which is a relatively large cost. We want the change-in-filesize to remain as high as possible for as long as possible.

Now, if you follow the red line from 4 to 5, you’ll see that that’s a 20.32% loss in filesize, which is pretty close to our previous 23.93% loss in filesize in going from 3 to 4. In fact, we’ve only lost 15.09% of change-in-filesize from the previous step. So these are the values we really want to examine: change in change-in-filesize, represented by the orange line.

This is nowhere close to exponential, nor does it follow any predictable decline. It darts around, seemingly at random. And we want to catch it at its lowest values, at points that represent changes in qscale that were nearly as efficient as the previous change in qscale. So the most desirable qscale values become, quite obviously, 5, 9, and 11.

What this means is that if quality is your primary concern (and you’re not crazy enough to encode at qscale 1), go with 5. qscale 5 turns 3:14 minutes of video into 30.62MB, which requires a download rate of 157.84KB/s to stream smoothly. qscale 11 will give you about half the filesize, and require a download rate of 77.37KB/s. But, because that’s the level at which picture quality really begins to suffer, and because most people don’t really mind buffering for a few seconds initially, I’m probably going to stick with qscale 9, whose videos take up 91.58 kilobytes per second, and which is by far the most efficient qscale anyway, with only a 4.92% change in change-in-filesize.

One caveat: This whole examination presupposes (as far as I can tell) that if it were possible to measure and chart the changes in the actual perceived visual quality of videos encoded at these qscale values, the curve would be perfectly geometric or exponential, with no aberrations similar to those above, and with all extrapolated delta curves showing no aberrations either. Given that, it might be easier to believe that every step you take through the qscale is of equal relative cost, and that there are no “objectively preferable” qscale values. But that is a lot more boring.

Here’s Slate on the subject:

First, I grew excited at this promise, then began to wonder why no theologian, philosopher, or sitcom star in recorded history had done it before—Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Tina Yothers, whoever—and realized I was in for a letdown. Comfort’s cadences were not even those of a preacher but of an infomercial host, and the God Squad had but three arguments on behalf of the big guy: All things have makers; the human conscience is evidence of a higher moral power; if you read the Gospel, then Christ will be revealed to you. For reasons too stupid to type, this was not an airtight case, and the atheists made quick work of it in tones of juvenile sarcasm.

They also threw in the first mover argument, which technically differs from the watchmaker argument. The content of the debate is of almost no interest, of course, as it closely parallels countless conversations that have taken place before it. But its being presented by ABC is significant, even unprecedented by recent standards of network television. Which isn’t to say that religion and God are never mentioned on TV, but that when they are, they are dismissed as irreconcilable, deeply personal things that don’t invite inspection beyond that of the effects they have on people’s behavior. They are approached as moral and cultural issues — never as metaphysical ones. And the idea that a large-ish portion of the American public might see people earnestly discussing the nature of infinity and causality, even if ineptly, only hours after Ugly Betty, fascinated me, despite my confidence that none of it would be illuminating, and that it was a ratings stunt.

I didn’t see the “distilled” version on Nightline, and the YouTube videos were removed before I could watch or save them, but I hear they did a pretty bad job with the material. At the moment, the entire debate is still available at the story’s ABC page, but, knowing that they probably won’t last, and with a tendency toward obsessive archivism and a disdain for ABC’s intractable flash player, I collected them myself. Altogether they’re about 97 minutes. If you’re short on time and have to be choosy, watch the “Mocking Darwin” segment, which contains the most lolz, and a guided, pictorial tour of an understanding of evolution so profoundly misinformed that even Lamarck is rolling his eyes. And he’s dead. As I watch this debate, I keep expecting Kirk to break character. Then I think, Ray must have some dangerously compromising photos of him.

From the Columbia Journalism Review:

We could go on, but why? Nightline felt no responsibility to take the issue seriously enough to include, say, a scientist or a theologian in the debate, so other than pointing out the dumbing down of the national conversation, we’ll just leave it at saying that we expect more of Nightline, and the American people deserve better than being forced to endure half-baked publicity stunts dressed up as news.

Thrown in at the end are some recent discussions Bill O’Reilly has had with Kirk Cameron and Richard Dawkins, in which Bill presents his own fucked version of an anthropic argument, expressing amazement that we could have “lucked out” by having such a habitable planet land on us, and plenty more frustratingly nebulous reasoning for your teeth-gnashing pleasure.

The videos were recorded using a years-old tool that I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember. CamStudio records the activity in a selected portion of your screen, and spits out an .avi. Its current version is from 2003, but, thanks to its open-sourceness, is still being developed. It gives you the option to use different recording codecs and to tweak their parameters, but the only way I was able to get results was with enormous files, approaching 1GB for 15 minutes of 320×240 video. Which is a pain in the ass, but it works.

Things I’m looking forward to in the next week:

• Tears of the Valedictorian on Tuesday
• Bishop Allen at The Middle East Upstairs tomorrow night
• Acid Mothers Temple at The Middle East Upstairs Saturday night
• Trans Am at Great Scott on Wednesday night
• Sunset Rubdown at The Middle East Downstairs next Saturday

The other day I downloaded and installed Pine. I’m having some difficulty getting it to use my SMTP server. I don’t need it, but I’m drawn to technologies that appear obsolete but that manage to survive heartily in spite of it, especially text-based ones — Pine is “robust” and “stalwart” and other strong, respectable adjectives. My real motivation though is that it’s what we used to access our email at U of I, and I want to relive that, because I’m a huge sap. What browser did I use back then anyway?

I got episode 1 of TV Party this week, and I’m trying my damnedest to rip it using MediaCoder, but I’m having troubles. FairUse might be a viable alternative, but I don’t have enough free space on my internal drive to try it out at the moment.

At last weekend’s Times New Viking show, they didn’t play “We Got Rocket.”

Also, what is this shit?:

As I mentioned in a previous post, all the chores I was made to do in foobar seemed to keep me from listening to music: I was working for my software, and not vice-versa. My collection of music felt cold and dead and fragile in the hands of foobar, and none of the features I had idealized in my mind were anywhere near fruition (true hotness, similarity-by-mood filters, etc.). I desperately wanted something to get me back in touch with my music, something that delivered music to me in a way that felt as natural as buying a CD and putting it in my stereo. I even considered switching to iTunes.

MP3Toys isn’t for every foobar user; I just got lucky enough that it emulates my ideal behavior in foobar. It’s a living, breathing program, and using it is a humanistic experience. It understands not just that you listen to music, but why you listen to music. Some of its intelligent features include:

• Album art storage: Sure, I’ve spent countless hours collecting album art for all the music on my hard drive, and MP3Toys can’t use it. But what it can do is automatically download art from Amazon and store it in each album’s folder. And for the art that isn’t available on Amazon, there is a built-in “Search RateYourMusic” launcher, among other engines, and images can be dragged onto albums from both Windows Explorer and any web browser.
• Album art display: MP3Toys places so much emphasis on album art that not only is the cover of the currently playing album prominently displayed in the center of the window, but your entire library is displayed as album art. This may seem cumbersome with a large collection, but with MP3Toys’ searching and filtering options, browsing your music is a breeze. Additionally — and this may seem trivial, but — when music is playing and you haven’t touched your mouse for a while, MP3Toys blows up the current album art to occupy the whole screen. That’s just cool.
• Disk monitor: I hate TSR programs, but MP3Toys’ system tray disk monitor is worth it. This small program watches your music directories for changes and additions, which means that MP3Toys’ library is a live and accurate reflection of the contents of your hard drive. Never again will some downloaded album be lost among a dozen others. What this also means is that, when a torrent finishes in the background, I can watch the new album simply materialize in MP3Toys’ browser, with the corresponding album art downloaded.
• Library filters: The album-panning browser in the lower portion of the screen can be filtered and sorted in a number of ways (by folder, rating, last played, decade, etc.), but the best in my opinion is the “New” filter. Clicking “New” displays only albums you’ve acquired in the last three months, sorted by how recently they were added to your hard drive — like the stack of CDs on your desk from your trip to the record store.
• Charts and history: One thing that really won me over is MP3Toys’ charts feature, which behaves almost exactly like the hotness algorithm I’ve been developing for over a year. The vertically-sorted charts consider both how much you’ve listened to an album (in total duration, not just by track count), and how recently you’ve listened to an album (with more recent listens positioned higher in the charts). Simply brilliant. The history list needs no explanation, but is really convenient as well. Both surpass foobar’s abilities in these regards, in large part because they think in terms of albums — not songs.

These are the features that, more than any other, make MP3Toys the most well-designed music jukebox I’ve used — and I’ve used a lot. Furthermore, its lone developer, Robert Frahm, is almost unbelievably responsive to user feedback. Even while I was still in trial mode, he was responding to my forum posts within 24 hours, often releasing small upgrades to address the issues I brought up. This degree of dedication to such an already impressive program led me to actually pay for it, something I’ve only done a handful of times.

So what if I don’t make absolutely sure that every tag is accurate and spelled and punctuated correctly? If that’s the cost of having a fluid music player that is grounded in reality, and not some theoretical realm of standards and universal adaptability, so be it. The playlist, queue, and tag editor are features I’m not entirely comfortable with yet, but I’ll get there. In the meantime, I’m listening to music again.