MyParo: My Playlist and Repository Organizer

Manoj Plakal
terabaap@users.sourceforge.net

History:

• Started out in Jan 2001 as an excuse for doing Python and wxPython programming.

• Tired of bland playlist managers in Winamp and XMMS, and brain-dead SQL-based command-liners in Unix land. Better options:
  • MP3 Explorer: better UI. Windows Explorer-like view of songs grouped by artists and albums. Integrating artist info and cover art is cool.

  • iTunes: slick and hard to beat. All collections of music are unified as playlists, listed on the left. The entire library just becomes a special playlist. Browsing interface allows browsing within a playlist. And streaming music browser included. And now with a music store integrated to browse both music previews and artist info. They just need to integrate with Amazon, Allmusic and lyrics sites to produce the ultimate one stop shop: music, bios, lyrics, reviews, genre intros, hyperlinking, the works.

• What I'd like:
  • The concept of a playstream: the real-time play list of songs seen by the player, as opposed to static playlists.
    The playstream is basically a timeline with past songs, present song and future songs.
    If you liked a particular sequence of songs that just played, you can save them from the past in a new playlist, or play them again by dragging them to the future. You can drag albums and playlists to the future and tweak them a little bit, re-arranging and dropping songs. At a glance, you can see what's coming. Useful when playing in shuffle mode. Basically, the playstream has more of a real-time DJ mixing flavor than manually sequencing through songs and playlists.

  • A single program, with a GUI, that manages the song library: keeping track of where songs are, their attributes, their sequencing during play, and optionally related network search: browsing information on the artists and genres, song lyrics, reviews and so on.

Proposed Feature list:

• Windows-Explorer-like organizer of MP3s and playlists
• controls an external MP3 player (Winamp/XMMS/iTunes)
• access to the playstream (current song, songs played recently, upcoming songs)
• group songs by Artist, Album, Genre or any song attributes
• powerful search on any song attributes
• edit song attributes (standard ID3 tags and user-created ones)
• built-in browser to find info on current song in All Music, Amazon, Apple Music Store, grab song lyrics, cover art, etc.
• built-in scripting system to manipulate MP3s (renaming, tagging, creating playlists etc)
• Should handle both local and remote MP3 files
• cross-platform: runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS

Technical stuff:

• Written in Python
• Cross-platform GUI via wxPython
• Cross-platform Desktop RPC via Qasid
• Plan to use Metakit as an MP3 database, since it allows extensible schema.
• Plan to use Musicbrainz for auto-tagging of MP3s
• Brief fantasy of embedding Lua for scripting (instead of default boring Python option)

Status:

Initial chunk of coding done in January 2001 on vacation. Available below.

Hiatus since then. Also, main platform shifted to MacOS X from Windows/Linux. Python/wxPython on OS X is a little slow and clunky right now. Perhaps just use a light scripting wrapper over Cocoa like Lua? Or PyObjC? Or Python with Tk (eeks) or FLTK?

No major stable releases yet. For now, you can

• browse the CVS repository
• download the current version of the source (includes Winamp plugin, works better on Windows than Linux or MacOS)
• check out some screenshots (Windows version): Main window, MP3 info dialog,

Check out the project page at .