Debian Package a Day ([info]debaday) wrote,
@ 2004-08-17 08:00:00
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madman - An advanced music manager application
madman is a tool to help you manage your music collection. It reads and writes tags for you, organizes, searches, deletes, plays, and enqueues in XMMS. A powerful expression syntax and a streamlined one-window GUI allow you to listen to better music all the time. The "Play 20 random songs" feature lets you discover music you didn't even know you owned.

Diwaker G. suggested this package and passed along this bit from the upstream website at http://madman.sourceforge.net/
madman makes your digital music experience what it should have been from the start. Fun, not clumsy. Organized, not a mess. Cool, not technical. Let's face it: The "Open file" dialog is not an appropriate way to find the music that you like.

Features:


  • Power and extensibility

    • Once you find the music you've been looking for, madman easily plays it in your favorite MP3 player. You can also burn these songs to music or data CDs. And if that's not enough, writing a plugin for madman takes no more than writing a shell script. That way, you can upload music to your portable MP3 player with one click of the mouse. feel it...


  • Smart playlists

    • Have you ever found it clumsy and tiring to manually add song by song to your playlist, just to be able to listen to your all-time favorites? Sure enough, madman imports your previous work and manages existing playlists. But it also gives you a new and easier way to rack up the music you like. It can use your ratings and listening habits to write automatic, smart playlists for you. more...


  • Just the basics

    • madman is fast. Designed from the ground up to avoid expensive operations, it will not slow you down, even if your computer is not the newest. Even with several thousand songs in your database, madman usually starts up in less than two or three seconds. madman's user interface is extremely simple. Almost everything works through right-click menus or drag'n'drop. Even compared to the last release, the new UI has been simplified a great deal - yet with no sacrifice in power. madman's C++ code base is clean and extensible, so if you find yourself in need of one specific feature, you can usually add it in very little time. see it...


  • Smokes the competition.

    • More than likely you will have heard of Apple's iTunes. If you're a Windows user, you might have seen MoodLogic, MusicMatch or some others. If you already use Linux, you might have seen Rhythmbox, Yammi, JuK, Mp3Kult or Zinf. madman is pretty much in the same vein as all these. They all suck. All music managers suck. madman just sucks less. (Hm. Apologies to Michael R. Elkins :))



More information on this package can be found on the Debian web site.
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madman is true unix tool
(Anonymous)
2004-08-17 09:49 am UTC (link)
madman fulfills the unix philosophy's rule of modularity, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2877537.

madman just handles playlists and leaves the playing to xmms. i tried rhythmbox but didn't like it because to use the playlist features, i had to loose all the features/plugins of xmms.

i saw talk on the madman web site about users wanting madman to incorporate music playing functionality, but i would argue against it.

let madman manage the music/playlist and xmms play the music.

(Reply to this)

[info]miguelitof
2004-08-17 10:59 am UTC (link)
I tried madman, but I preferred prokyon3. Both are very similar - so similar I wouldn't be surprised if they share a common ancestor. But there's something about prokyon3 that grabbed my attention.

It has been forever since a new release of Prokyon3, however, so I may end up switching sometime soon.

(Reply to this)(Thread)
prokyon3 requirements
(Anonymous)
2004-08-18 09:35 am UTC (link)
mysql?

for desktop use?

maybe to store the metadata for a (streaming) music SERVER, but a desktop application?

nope, sorry, not gonna do it.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: prokyon3 requirements
[info]miguelitof
2004-08-18 09:51 am UTC (link)
Oh, hell yeah! MySQL works wonderfully for desktop use. Once upon a time, it was basically tailor-made to be a desktop database. And it still works as wonderfully now. I have MySQL running for applications that I wrote anyway, so using it for Prokyon3 was natural.

Using MySQL provides excellent power for Prokyon3. But even more importantly to me, it provides a way for me to easily access my music collection via other apps. For example, I wrote a simple script that will extract a playlist from Prokyon's database, print out the artist and title to a text file for easy pasting into a LiveJournal entry, and then spit out WAV files ready for burning to CD. I could make the script burn directly to CD, but most of my playlists require multiple CDs.

My script does a simple connect to the Prokyon database and then queries as needed. It's ultra-smooth, precisely because it Prokyon3 uses MySQL.

Why wouldn't you use MySQL for a desktop application? I can't think of a single good reason not to!

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: prokyon3 requirements
(Anonymous)
2004-08-19 10:12 am UTC (link)
undue complexity.

you can still have a data store that is accessible to many applications, but specific to a particular one, without having to run a server process: berkeley db or gdbm.

so, to run prokyon3 you have to either run mysql yourself or have access to mysql.

on a personal computer, this is easy: apt-get install mysql. not the most difficult thing to administrate a mysql installation, but it's still a learning curve. (i should know, i finally got my hands dirty with mysql which took a few nights.) definitely not something for aunt tellie.

on an enterprise computer, where more than likely the user does not have root access, you have to compile for and install everything to your home directory. not so difficult for an application, but not simple for a server process. be sure to use something besides tcp/ip (unix sockets?) to insure only you can communicate with mysql. and as you don't have access to the system-wide init scripts, find some way (cron?) to insure that mysql is always running after a reboot. oh yeah, what about a clean shutdown so you don't corrupt the database when the computer shuts down? or maybe you'll get lucky and bob down in web design has an installation of mysql for testing that he can set you up with. but even as good as apt-get is, it won't get you set-up with bob. ;-)

yeah, it's possible. just not easy. definitely not as easy as berkeley db or gdbm.

right tool for the right job.

using a sledge hammer to hang pictures in your house works, and that sledge hammer sure is powerful (don't have to worry about hitting the nail twice or missing the nail head), but a lot of work to just hang pictures.

ps hey, if it works for you, then use it. just don't expect your evangelism to win over too many converts once they find out what it requires.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: prokyon3 requirements
[info]miguelitof
2004-08-19 11:36 am UTC (link)
ps hey, if it works for you, then use it. just don't expect your evangelism to win over too many converts once they find out what it requires.


And don't expect your anti-evangilism to convert people away from Prokyon3 and other mysql-based programs.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: prokyon3 requirements
[info]k8to
2004-08-26 06:41 pm UTC (link)
It was convincing for me.. *shrug*

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[info]purplebob
2004-08-17 11:10 am UTC (link)
Is there a music manager anywhere that assumes I've at least tried to sort my music already, and doesn't make me start from scratch?

For example, lots of my music is in Artist/Album/ style directories. All music managers seem to ignore the directories that the things are in, and instead sort by the (woefully inconsistent) ID3 tags. I just tried madman, and it seems to be the same.

(Reply to this)(Thread)
moosic
[info]toykeeper
2004-08-17 06:00 pm UTC (link)
I switched to moosic a while ago, after months of xmms not working right. I've since added various features I had wanted, which is pretty easy since it's organized decently and written in python.

Anyway, it works based on songs being sorted on the filesystem, say, in Artist/Album/ directories. There are command-line, web, and gtk interfaces available, though I prefer the command line one. (nothing quite beats the simplicity of "moosic add Orbital" and "moosic pause") It doesn't care if your music is mp3, ogg, mod, sid, midi, wav, flac, or ... whatever. Just tell it which program to play each file type with. You could probably use it as a video DJ too, though I haven't tried it.

My modified version is online... I added a couple of basic things like a "loop one" mode and "true random" order mode, and the ability to attach arbitrary data to each file. I use that (so far) to store song ratings, and have added a few rating modes to make it play better songs more often. This will likely get incorporated upstream as soon as I or the author have time.

http://toykeeper.net/tmp/moosic-1.5-tk.tar.gz

Or, try the official site: http://www.nanoo.org/~daniel/moosic/

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: moosic
[info]miguelitof
2004-08-18 09:57 am UTC (link)
Yeah, but you're weird that way! :D I swear, I bet you're on Crystal City or something...

What is your "True Random" mode? Does that mean it could theoretically play the same exact track multiple times in a row? I like Creative's "Shuffle Repeat" mode on their Nomad Jukebox. It does a random shuffle, but marks each track as played as it is played. The track will then not be played again until all tracks in the playlist have been played.

I actually want to add that functionality into fortune, now that I think about it.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)
Re: moosic
[info]toykeeper
2004-08-18 03:59 pm UTC (link)
"True random" meant "randomly choose a song from anywhere in the playlist every time", so it can play something 5 times in a row, or only play it once a year. Previously, it only had a "shuffle" function, to play each song in the playlist once, in random order. I like both, and different times.

XMMS has a "randomize playlist" and a "shuffle" (true random), but the former isn't accessible via command line or keypress. So, while using it, I'd usually just turn on shuffle, even though it occasionally sucked (it played Led Zeppelin's "The Lemon Song" 5 times in 2 hours at work, which made people start asking if there was something wrong with me).

(Reply to this)(Parent)
sort by directories?
(Anonymous)
2004-08-18 09:15 am UTC (link)
yeah, i know a music player that supports sorting music by directories. plays mp3, ogg, flac, speex, etc. it's also simple on the surface (newbie), yet if you poke around you can find drown yourself in configuration options (guru).

it's foobar2000! *ducks*

honestly, i have heard of people running foobar2000 under wine. not that i recommend it, but always an option.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]miguelitof
2004-08-18 10:03 am UTC (link)
All music managers seem to ignore the directories that the things are in, and instead sort by the (woefully inconsistent) ID3 tags. I just tried madman, and it seems to be the same.


apt-get install easytag

And then fix the ID3 tags on your music collection! easytag makes it fairly easy, especially with it's "filename to tag" scanner. It can automatically figure out the artist, album and title from the directory/filename structure. As you've noticed, just about all music players rely on ID3 tags, not filenames. You can fight against it, or you can spend a couple of hours and make your collection organized via both filesystem and metadata.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

[info]purplebob
2004-08-18 03:18 pm UTC (link)
You know, I'd rather not. I tried easytag, and its interface is confusing as all hell. Plus, you can't make "miscellaneous" groups with tags, like when you have just one song from each of a bunch of albums, or live recordings, or whatever, at least not in any way that a music manager seems to recognize.

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[info]miguelitof
2004-08-18 03:26 pm UTC (link)
Good luck then, mate.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]toykeeper
2004-08-18 04:21 pm UTC (link)
I dislike the practice of relying upon id3 tags.

Metadata is an important part of files, and filesystems will have to adapt to store it in a standardized manner. It will probably take a decade to make the change, but I expect we'll soon do away with things such as id3 tags and EXIF jpeg info. Instead, it'll be stored in the filesystem as database-like filesystems become more common. ReiserFS4 seems to be leading the pack in this area.

Personally, I often want my filenames to differ from the metadata. What if, for example, the song title has a slash in it? What if it's utf-8 encoded Japanese and I can't type it in? What if there are a dozen artists and I don't want hellishly-long directory names? What if I just don't want spaces or punctuation in my filenames?

MP3 tags aren't even adequate most of the time, so I don't use them as the basis of my organization. What if I want to split files according to arbitrary concepts, not embodied in the tags, such as whether I've sorted and approved the songs? What if I want to add info which the tags cannot hold, such as how good song A sounds after song B, how fast it is, what "color" it is, or how I rate it overall? What if I use formats which don't have embedded tags? What if a field (such as genre) should have multiple values (an artist being in more than one genre)? What if the data applies to the entire album, instead of just one song? What if the metadata isn't text (album cover)? Why not use a system capable of answering all these questions, instead of one which cannot?

For now, given current limitations, I've just been storing this info in the filesystem, as Album/.file.mp3/.rating, or /Artist/Album/.cover . And I use that info via moosic, which is filesystem-friendly and easy to modify. :)

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

[info]miguelitof
2004-08-19 11:48 am UTC (link)
Personally, I often want my filenames to differ from the metadata. What if, for example, the song title has a slash in it? What if it's utf-8 encoded Japanese and I can't type it in? What if there are a dozen artists and I don't want hellishly-long directory names? What if I just don't want spaces or punctuation in my filenames?


Isn't that a great justification for using id3 tags? You could have your filename be 3xc34d.mp3, but you'd still be able to tell what you are listening to via the id3 tag and the ability for virtually every music player to display the tag.

I'm not suggesting giving up on using the filesystem for organization (as I mentioned on CC, I've got a strict directory structure for my music directory). But using ID3 tags can add a lot that current filesystem structures cannot happen.

ID3 v2 added support for a bunch of extra metadata, including:

# supports Unicode.
# composer, conductor, media type, BPM, copyright message, etc.
# custom fields
# lyrics as well as music-synced lyrics (karaoke)
# volume, balance, equalizer and reverb settings.
# images and just about any file you want to include.
# enciphered information, linked information and weblinks.

(Reply to this)(Parent)
juk does it nicely
(Anonymous)
2004-08-25 05:59 pm UTC (link)
I was having the same kind of trouble, but last night I tried fixing all my ID3 tags using juk and it was very easy. Not using it for actually playing them though.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

[info]k8to
2004-08-17 03:57 pm UTC (link)
I'm still waiting for the music manager that doesn't assume that music _must_ be stored as mp3 or ogg.

Beyond this blocker (for me), madman had a pretty bizarro interface that made very challenging to just queue up some music to play. Buttons buttons everywhere, but nothing sane to click.

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music on CD-R
(Anonymous)
2004-08-25 01:51 am UTC (link)
I have to keep most of my collection of ogg/mp3 files on CDs since I don't have enough HD space. Can madman also keep track of these CDs and tell me on which CD a certain song or album is located? Currently I use prokyon3, but I find its GUI to be very cluttered, madman looks much nicer.

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While the lawsuit claims that
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2004-09-14 09:28 pm UTC (link)
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