*sigh* I've asked everywhere I can think of, and no one has any ideas. The current music program I use is the best I can find--but it still has major bugs and issues and areas of improvement, and I wonder if anyone has found one with these specific attributes:
- ability to tag songs with more than one genre (I have music that I want to mark as Celtic, and Folk, and Instrumental, and Soundtrack, for instance--I tend to be very specific about how I tag songs, and I need to be able to create my own tags, not just pick from a standard list)
- ability to filter songs based on combinations of genres (allowing for both AND and/or OR operations, not merely OR only or suchlike--in other words for those who don't know Boolean operators, I want to be able to control it so I can allow only songs that are both Instrumental AND Soundtrack, or to allow songs that are *either* Instrumental OR Soundtrack, depending on what I need right then--there is a big difference between the two!)
- a playlist component separate from the library component (no queueing up a few files within the library for playback without being able to see a visible playlist of what's queued--in other words, trying to play anything from the library should automatically send it to a visible playlist separate from the library)
- ability to "update" where a file is (for instance, if I rename a whole folder, the program will lose track of the songs, and rather than remove them and re-add them, I want to be able to "re-find" the song through a file dialog and redirect the program to its new location--this would then preserve all tagging, the number of times played, etc. so I don't have to do all sorts of editing when adding the song again)
- ability to play a wide variety of file types, not just mp3 (wav, FLAC, ogg, wma, m4a, ape, etc.--I have all these kinds, and while I can convert a FLAC, ape or uncompressed wav to one of the others without losing more quality, double compression is a very bad thing and I'd rather be able to play my music as-is)
The only program I've found to be able to tag songs with multiple genres is dBpowerAMP, and it only allows OR when filtering (at times I need AND so songs have to fit both genres before being allowed). It does allow all sorts of files to be played if you install the needed codecs for it. It has an atrocious playlist system, however, though you can at least see queued songs separately somewhat. And it freaks out when a song is moved and I have to remove the song and re-add it, which is a big pain. Hence although I've used it extensively in the past, I've gotten so fed up with it that I haven't used anything but Windows Media Player 6.4 to play files for a long while (I set it as my default mp3 player, and it's so speedy to pop up and play a single track--but that doesn't help when I want to shuffle music or set up a playlist).
So I'm at my wit's end trying to find one that will do these things, if it indeed exists. (Personally, these requirements are so logical I'm surprised no one has created such a program yet, but maybe there's just not enough people who really care about managing their music to this level.) Really, the most important aspects to me are the multi-genre tagging and filtering based on that. If those things aren't present, the player is deficient, to my eyes. Which doesn't speak well for nearly everything out there. *big sigh*
Anyone have ideas? Or better yet, anyone want to program this?
(I should mention I had a boyfriend who started creating such a program for me, but when we broke up, that kinda stagnated. I've still got all his code, binaries, and such, on my computer, but it's in definite alpha stages so far, and he was trying to code it to work on both Ubuntu and Windows both, since he ran Ubuntu, so that made things a bit interesting for him.)
