rhythmbox

I sometimes use rhythmbox to download music from other people's daap shares. I wish I had a better interface to the download queue. Right now, there's just a progress bar. I want to see what songs are being downloaded. If a share suddenly goes down, I want to be able to delete those things from the queue without stalling the rest of it. Or set things to pause and resume later when the share comes back online.

I have a weekly freeform radio show on WCBN. I've had this show for a number of years. Every week, I put a playlist together. I like having them around for historical purposes, but now my list of playlists in rhythmbox is quite long.

I wish that I could create a playlist folder to store all my old playlists, and I could choose to show it expanded or not.

itunes music sharing protocol (the old one that we know how to use, not the new one that was created as a hostile attack against us) has the ability to serve ratings with its export.

But Rhythmbox doesn't seem to be able to read those ratings. That would be useful. Ratings are important to me, cuz I have too much music to keep in my head at once.

Rhythmbox also doesn't have the ability to serve those ratings out.

mt-daapd, also known as "Firefly Media Server" is super-excellent. It's a daemon that lets me share my music over the itunes sharing protocol. Having it as a daemon is a good move, I think, because it can be serving regardless of whether I happen to be running rhythmbox at that time.

Also, it lets me have a machine that lets me serve my music and does little else. There's no reason to marry the serving of music with a GUI.