Date: 07/23/10 (Software)    Keywords: programming

(x-posted to geekware)

I am looking for a music player (for Windows) that has certain features, but everything I can find lacks one or more features.

They are:
- 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)
- 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.)

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.) If it doesn't, is there anywhere I should post ideas for programming projects? I'm not a programmer, else I would have tackled this long ago. (I should mention I had a boyfriend who was, 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.)

Source: http://software.livejournal.com/88098.html