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DeaDBeeF – A modular audio player for Unix-like systems

deadbeef.sourceforge.io

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Re: DeaDBeeF – A modular audio player for Unix-like systems

#11

Post by benrbray »

How is the tagging system in DeaDBeef? My music library has grown exponentially in the past year or so, due to boredom during covid, and I've come to the conclusion that playlists (as in, static lists of music files that you need to update manually) are functionally useless for large libraries.

What I've been looking for, but so far haven't been able to find, is a system that creates playlists from queries to my music database, based on tags I assign to individual songs. Even better if I can use a logic programming / query language like Datalog to help simplify tagging! For instance, if I have songs with the following tags:

  (Song 1) japan 1971 japanese jazz funk fusion female
  (Song 2) japan 2004 instrumental math-rock
  (Song 3) japan 1983 japanese enka female
  (Song 4) korea 1983 japanese rock male
  (Song 5) brazil 1973 spanish jazz instrumental
  (Song 6) mali 1979 blues rock folk tuareg
  (Song 7) algeria 1974 french folk
I should be able to define logic rules that make tagging easier. Ideally, the tagging system should automatically write any deduced tags as metadata for the original files (for compatibility with other music players), with some way to keep track of which tags were added automatically vs manually, in case the deduction rules change.

  asia(x) :- japan(x) OR korea(x) or ...
  africa(x) :- algeria(x) OR egypt(X) OR ...
  latin(x) :- mexico(x) OR brazil(x) or ...
  rock(x) :- math-rock(x)
  etc
I should be able to create playlists from the following queries that automatically update themselves when I add new music:

  (playlist 1) ?- language(x,"french") AND region(x, "africa") AND (1960
Apologies for the inconsistent syntax, but hopefully you get the rough idea. Does anything like this exist? The built-in Rhythmbox music player for linux has decent support for saving playlists based on tags, but there's no built-in system for logic programming based on tags.

Re: DeaDBeeF – A modular audio player for Unix-like systems

#12

Post by 867-5309 »

endbringer93 wrote: post #10
p1necone wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a music streaming service came out that had a good API for integrating with 3rd party UIs I would switch in a heartbeat. For now Spotify is still a better experience than maintaining my own collection though.

No, it really isn't. The time you spend with UI is much greater than time you spend managing your collection so bad UI is far worse than a couple of evenings getting your collection in order. Also you get to enjoy your favorite albums not getting taken down without warning or reason.

you forgot to mention the time it takes hunting for your 'obscure teenage years' CDs on eBay, setting up search alerts for each CD to appear for ~$1 with cheap shipping, waiting three weeks for them to arrive from Lithuania, alcohol-rubbing the dozen sale stickers off the jewel case, cleaning the CDs with lint-free holy water, ripping the audio losslessly at superfast 52x, physically scanning with a scanner and optimizing the album artwork, categorizing, metadata'ing, updating and maintaining your Frankenstein music database, updating the online database for prospective fake internet points, and relisting each CD at $2

Re: DeaDBeeF – A modular audio player for Unix-like systems

#13

Post by 4bpp »

Happy long-term user here. I switched to DeaDBeeF from foobar2k shortly after I made the move to desktop Linux a good decade ago, since fb2k only ran very awkwardly in Wine at the time.

One advantage of DB is how simple and elegant its plugin API is. I remember fb2k's being the worst of the early-2000s high corporate C++ style (with a thicket of templated factory classes that were completely opaque to debuggers and IDEs); in comparison, DB's is a straightforward plain C interface with nary an unnecessary moving part.

Re: DeaDBeeF – A modular audio player for Unix-like systems

#14

Post by raziel2p »

Looks amazing! I really miss foobar2000 for its album organization possibilities - but at the same time I don't miss having to maintain mp3 files on my hard drive, so I'm still contempt enough with Spotify even though its interface is designed for a completely different target audience than me.

Re: DeaDBeeF – A modular audio player for Unix-like systems

#15

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

DeadBeeF is probably the best nix-first GUI player out there, but even though it's not a new project, some parts of the UI still seriously lag behind Foobar2000.

Some wishes from me, from memory:

- You can't use more than one scrobbling service simultaneously.

- You can't tweak parameters of burnt-in converter settings

- You can't easily switch the language of the interface (It just drives me nuts when software and internet pages assume the language)

Re: DeaDBeeF – A modular audio player for Unix-like systems

#16

Post by haspok »

Happy long-term user here. I'm probably one of the few people who have an extended mp3 collection in "physical files" (is that a thing nowadays?) stored on a physical hard drive, some of which I actually grabbed myself from CD, casettes, even vinyl. I've never used iTunes or any online streaming service. If I need something I don't have on my disk, I just go to Youtube.

In the late 90s I was a happy Winamp user, because back then it was just a player and not much else. Deadbeef is exactly that, it works perfectly under linux (KDE), it is very unobtrusive, can be controlled by the media keyboard buttons if needed, in general, it just gets out of the way and does one thing and one thing well (play music, that is, preferably in the background).

Re: DeaDBeeF – A modular audio player for Unix-like systems

#18

Post by arpa »

867-5309 wrote: post #12
endbringer93 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it really isn't. The time you spend with UI is much greater than time you spend managing your collection so bad UI is far worse than a couple of evenings getting your collection in order. Also you get to enjoy your favorite albums not getting taken down without warning or reason.

you forgot to mention the time it takes hunting for your 'obscure teenage years' CDs on eBay, setting up search alerts for each CD to appear for ~$1 with cheap shipping, waiting three weeks for them to arrive from Lithuania, alcohol-rubbing the dozen sale stickers off the jewel case, cleaning the CDs with lint-free holy water, ripping the audio losslessly at superfast 52x, physically scanning with a scanner and optim…

It is can be a very fun hobby, though.

Re: DeaDBeeF – A modular audio player for Unix-like systems

#19

Post by brnt »

benrbray wrote: post #11

How is the tagging system in DeaDBeef? My music library has grown exponentially in the past year or so, due to boredom during covid, and I've come to the conclusion that playlists (as in, static lists of music files that you need to update manually) are functionally useless for large libraries. What I've been looking for, but so far haven't been able to find, is a system that creates playlists from queries to my musi…

I use Quodlibet and it allows you to construct such queries.

Re: DeaDBeeF – A modular audio player for Unix-like systems

#20

Post by scaladev »

imiric wrote: post #6

Looks great, foobar2000 was my player of choice many years ago on Windows. But these days I prefer the simplicity of mpv even for audio. It supports most audio formats, M3U playlists and HTTP, since I don't keep music locally anymore, and shows metadata and album art just fine, with a consistent UI across platforms and very lightweight on resources. Turns out I don't need much more than that. It's even extensible wit…

mpv also works fine as an image viewer if you don't view many high-res photographs (I don't).

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/7983

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