Music players of the next generation

I read this post and felt really inspired. It got me thinking about what music players of the next generation could look like.

My first music player was iTunes 4 or maybe Winamp. My music collection could be counted on fingers and I never really used playlists (I still use them rarely). Then I moved on to Linux and started using audacious and rhythmbox. I tried out banshee for sometime, but that really hogged my system.

So my ideas for the next generation of music players:

1. Someone implements rainct’s suggestion and it is also media player independent 🙂
2. The volume goes up and down depending on how far you are from the computer (using some sort of algorithm which is used by say, blueproximity for locking the screen when you are away)
3. Building on #1, sync popular tracks to the media player (hopefully players also get the same kind of stuff as #1).
4. Remember the volume used for each track. This should be simple to implement.
5. All of this is in a nice data store (zeitgeist/couchdb). Sync with Ubuntu one or similar services to get zeroconf sharing of settings across all computers.
6. A simple way of using blueproximity like things is to shift music playing from different speakers as one moves around the house.
7. Integrate with shackleton, which is an awesome tool for detecting context. Example: in the office, turn off loud rock and roll songs and switch to ambient music.
8. Filter by language of the music and/or instrument *without* any manual tagging.
9. Integrate live data from social networking (twitter/jabber status), so if your friends are playing something which is in your library you can listen to it, right now!

And we need good speech recognition, soon. Then we can take the leap to sci-fi music players 🙂

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