Creative Commons cafe - looking for music player software

[Sean Hammond]

Hmmm... well the goom plugin for xmms works, it slows down a lot if
you try to go fullscreen, but I suppose if I turn the resolution of
the monitor right down it'd work, and as long as it doesn't crash
that's good.

The goom plugin even displays the artist and song name when the track
changes, but you don't seem to be able to configure it to display
other fields or to change how it displays (i.e. keep it up there,
don't fade it out).

We want to display: artist, track name, album name, an extra note
about where you can buy or download the album (which we'll put in some
tag), and another note about how The Forest only plays free as in
freedom music (again, in some tag that we'll apply to all the files).

The OSD plugin only has an option to display the track name, so it's
no good, we need more than that.

Also XMMS's GUI doesn't seem ideal, especially for searching a large
music library. If we could get plugins for BMP that would be better,
but I feel something like Rhythmbox or Banshee would be ideal. That
GUI approach is much more suited to our use case - basically we can
point the app to a music folder and have it play random tracks from
that folder, if an artist rips his CD onto the machine (we'll
configure SoundJuicer to rip to the right folder in ogg vorbis) then
it'll automatically appear in the music player, or it should, the next
time the folder is scanned. The non-playlist focused approach is more
suitable to a cafe environment, where someone might go up to the
computer search for a track or album, and set that to play next, and
it's easy to set it back to playing everything again afterward. They
just don't have the plugins to display the info we need.

We could actually use the 'Small display' view of rhythmbox, which
displays the artist, song name and album name, and then could run some
other pretty animation app or something behind it... this new small
mode for banshee would be even better:
http://abock.org/2006/03/27/the-implemented-window/ because it also
displays cover art. Also Banshee has tag editing built into it which
will be useful, although it doesn't support mass-tagging. Not sure
exactly what we'd run in the background though. Any stand-alone
visualisation apps?

Muine might work quite well... the GUI only has one mode, but it
displays the necessary info about the song along with the album cover,
it has good functionality for searching a folder of music and adding
things to the playlist, and if we combine it with some of its plugins,
like MuineTagger...

Maybe we can actually do some hacking to integrate the necessary
pieces of software for this?

On 3/29/06, Olafur Arason <olafra at gmail.com> wrote:
> Xmms seems to the best option, it has xmms-goom and xmms-osd-plugin.
> Goom does visualisation and the osd plugin shows information on the screen.
> Rhythmbox has a plugin for osd it's called gnome-osd, but I'm not able to find
> a visualistion. Totem has goom but no osd. There is osd-xine also but there
> is no package for ubuntu, so you have to build it your self.
>
> Olafur Arason
>
> On 3/29/06, Sean Hammond <sean.hammond at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Okay, so there is a cafe here in Edinburgh, The Forest
> > (http://www.theforest.org.uk/). The forest includes a space for
> > independent musicians to record, perform and sell their music, and the
> > cafe plays only non-copyright music from these musicians and
> > downloaded from creative commons sources.
> >
> > The cafe plays music from a computer that is connected to a projector,
> > they would like to be able to display information through the
> > projector about each song as it plays - artist, album, how much you
> > can buy it for at the forest or where you can download it from, plus a
> > tagline saying 'the forest only uses creative commons music' or
> > something. I guess all that could be stored in the meta-data of the
> > music files.
> >
> > So does anyone know of a FLOSS music player that can run fullscreen,
> > perhaps but not necessarily displaying some visualisation, and
> > displaying this information about each track as it plays, either when
> > the song starts or throughout the track?
> >
> > The Forest also has a mac, so any free (of cost) mac software would
> > also be worth knowing about, but proper FLOSS is preferable.
> >
> > Recommendations?
> >
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> >
>
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