As somewhat of a Zune fanatic, it always makes me happy to see a new Metro-inspired UI, but every one of these Zune-inspired projects falls short when compared to the actual Zune application, which imo is the absolutely pinnacle of music players. It presents your music library in a way that to me is aesthetically pleasing and entirely intuitive. The three column layout, with sorting options for each, is ideal. Filtering does not dump you into a new page. It's hard to describe what makes it so pleasant to use, but no application I've found yet comes close.
I encourage anyone with a local music collection to go download Zune and give it a try.
Might Dopamine be of interest? It has a similar 3 pane interface at least.
IMHO Xbox 360, Zune, Windows 7-10 Mobile and Metro were very good UX implementations at their time, and bizarrely far superior to the touch mode Windows 11 offers today on tablets. WTF Microsoft, why are you regressing on all fronts?!
Zune never took off because it came too late and was going against a market already dominated by the iPod, and Metro was hated since Microsoft shoved it down the throats of desktop users with Windows 8, even though it was wonderful to use on tablets, except Windows tablets of the time sucked major ballsack since they were powered by anemic Intel Atom CPUs trying to run a full desktop OS compared to the ARM iPads running a mobile OS.
Current windows UI and esthetics is pretty good imho, if you ignore the ads being pushed everywhere. I really like WinUI 3
Zune never took off because Apple unveiled iPhone soon after.
When all the news and talks are about this iPod killer from Microsoft and then Apple themselves release a truly groundbreaking iPod killer themselves, you look foolish. Zune really got done in by marketing.
Definitely. But even if the iPhone were to be delayed there's no way Zune would have made a significant dent in iPod's market.
It was already the established player and the user base was already locked in with hundreds of $ in iTunes purchases. The usets weren't gonna throw that away no matter how much better Zune would have been.
iPod's market dominance wasn't in some UX magic that couldn't be replicated or braten by competitors, it was in the iTunes purchases that made it comfy to own specific songs and also locked users in.
I was sometimes involved in this project at MS. The music buying experience for Zune was awful, and I regret missed opportunities to be more forceful about telling the Windows Media execs that they were fucking up. Part of the problem was MS insistence on being fair to everyone and having an open system which led to 5000 shitty online stores where you could buy music. Instead of Apple that had exactly one where they owned and controlled the entire vertical.
This was the whole reason for creating Zune. Again, MS had licensed out their awful Windows Media products to 100 Chinese digital music player makers and got a fragmented market of trash, so MS jumped in to try and do it the right way themselves, but sadly too late.
I think the flat Metro UI evolved out of all the work we did coming out of the Windows Media division. I based all the flat design work I was doing for MS on British Sky TV's set top box graphics, simply because they were easiest for my developer brain to code and they also worked really well:
Microsoft’s decisions on windows will always be very funny. Push a gloriously designed tablet UI onto everybody, face backlash because nobody was buying windows tablets so it was tacky on desktop, come out with good windows tablets finally (or hybrid ones) but change the UI to a compromise that neither desktop or tablet users enjoy.
It's what you get when you have design by comitee instead.
Apple have a measure twice, cut once approach.
Microsoft seem to just hack away, cutting in the dark and don’t bother to measure at all. ;-)
Surface Pro with Windows 8 was pretty good, great performance on that device. I did a lot of sketching and some D&D world building with the pencil :). But the UX had a lot of frustrating spots where you still end up using Windows 95 UI because Microsoft didn’t care to update everything.
About a dozen years ago my employer wanted an intranet app for our mobile devices. Initially I was disappointed to have been assigned to create the Blackberry app because even though it was by far the most common phone in use by our employees, I could see the writing on the wall with Android and the iphone taking over. But I was also given free reign on the UI, which I borrowed very heavily from the Zune's UI. While it was well received, RIM really started falling apart around that time, which accelerated the replacing of the company issued Blackberries with BYOD. I was sad to see it go but also glad to be freed of the frustration of dealing with RIM and their often offline 'signing server'.
The author has shared a behind-the-scenes look at the design journey, explaining the challenges and thought processes behind bringing this retro-inspired player to life, though in Chinese:
Flutter plus Rust is the same stack I’m using for my music app.
Thanks to the awesome flutter_rust_bridge it’s very easy to use them together and leverage both their strengths.
However, Rune uses `rinf`, and I prefer the architecture design of `rinf` as it organizes data communication more clearly :P
I actually started out with rinf and switched when they moved to that architecture. rinf makes sense if your data model lives in rust, which is not the case in my app.
I did not test this yet, but Dynamic "Mix" Feature and Audio Analysis and Recommendations, those are features I always wanted to have for a local music player. Amarok had some simple variant of this. Spotify of course has as well, but not really for local music.
That was the main reason I started my own music player project (https://github.com/albertz/music-player). But it never really got to the point to have a more advanced variant of this features. The best it could do is randomly play through directories, but at least prefer liked songs. I implemented the core playing engine in C++ and the remaining logic in Python, as I thought that would give me most flexibility. Unfortunately I haven't found the time to work on it since a while.
Hi, I'm the developer of Rune. Honestly, I was a bit surprised to see my software mentioned on HN at this time. I had planned to introduce it once it had fewer bugs, improved performance, and cleaner source code.
Nevertheless, Rune might offer the features you're looking for. It not only provides recommendations based on individual tracks but also on criteria like "songs you've liked," "all music from a specific directory," or "all tracks from a particular album." Additionally, it can categorize recommended tracks into nine sub-lists based on acoustic features, helping you find the perfect arrangement.
Thanks to its separation of front-end and back-end, Rune can be used independently of a GUI. You can also use Rune's CLI to create M3U playlists. While these features haven't been fully refined due to my limited resources, I believe Rune has the potential to meet your expectations in the future.
Here are the document of the query syntax: https://github.com/Losses/rune/blob/master/documents/mix_que...
I hope that once Rune reaches a production-ready state, you'll remember it. I'll be looking forward to that day.
Why not use something like mpd and program an external playlist builder? That way, you focus only on what matters to you.
Reading your last commit, it seems like we had the similar idea of wanting more intelligent shuffle. Which is why I made a player that simply ingests plaintext playlists and then https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/mus/tree/75478f90269dca1b69e0d763d... to achieve what I wanted (though I'll probably modify it to avoid queuing albums sharing a primary genres; who wants 3 black metal LPs in a row?).
MPD was too restricted in functionality. It doesn't really provide such infinite play list concept. So I felt that I would fight with the limitations of the mpd API more than I really get something out of it.
Here are some comparisons to MPD: https://github.com/albertz/music-player/blob/master/Compare_...
Btw, my music player can even act as a MPD backend.
Writing the backend part was anyway the simpler part. And that covered quite a lot of things: https://github.com/albertz/music-player/blob/master/WhatIsAM...
The GUI turned out to be the trickier part. I wanted to design everything around this infinite play list concept, and that in a cross-platform way, but I didn't really finished that.
My Zune HD from 2005/2006 still works. I think it's the oldest piece of functional tech I own. No, I don't use it on a daily basis. But I love booting it up every now and again.
It's also a fun way to check on what I was listening to back then. A little trip down memory lane.
In a sea of streaming everything, it’s great to find pockets of local media players.
I’ve recently found myself experimenting with local playback and built https://github.com/xenodium/ready-player
While I used to stream music 100% of the time, that’s now more like 5%, dedicated exclusively to discovery.
These days, I’m now back to purchasing digital music and primarily local playback.
I realized that I don’t have a single mp3 on my machine these days. If I stop paying the bill I will have nothing to listen to. What have we done?
Depending on your genre preferences, Bandcamp.com might be for you. I buy 4-10 albums every month there, downloaded as FLAC for archival purposes, streamable on all my devices via jellyfin
If you stop paying the bill you still have access to YouTube, Spotify, and others
We have much higher engagement entertainment than music to keep us occupied.
> If I stop paying the bill I will have nothing to listen to. What have we done?
We’ve created one of the most amazing values and uses of technology of our lifetimes?
Streaming per month costs so much less than a new CD did 25-30 years ago. And it’s so so so much better than buying a new CD a month.
If the average person keeps paying the (quite small) bill, they can listen to essentially anything they want to listen to (unless they have very peculiar tastes — please do not reply to tell me that the obscure 1907 ragtime classic you need to listen to is not on Spotify).
It’s incredible!
>What have we done?
You mean "what have I done".
Dart and Rust mixed together. That's interesting. I'm wondering if Rust is needed for this application, couldn't everything technically done in Dart here?
Also I'd like to know more about the interop between Dart/Rust and what the experience is like!
Hi, I'm the developer of Rune. In this project, Dart is primarily used for the GUI, while Rust handles all data-related operations. As you mentioned, Dart's performance and ecosystem are sufficient for most tasks in a typical music player. However, Rune includes some complex features that challenge Dart's ecosystem and performance, such as media recommendation.
Rune has a built-in media analysis and recommendation system. It extracts dozens of acoustic features from audio, creating a high-dimensional space. Searching for nearby points in this space helps listeners find similar tracks, offering features akin to those on streaming platforms.
While creating a traditional audio player is an option, I wanted to explore something new. That's why I chose Rust for its performance and ecosystem advantages.
Regarding the inter-operation between Dart and Rust, I used a library called `rinf`. They communicate via protobuffer by sending signals to each other, and the experience has been quite smooth.
I wonder if any naming inspiration was taken from Roon, a very good music player.
Hi, Developer of Rune here.
Short answer: No. It's purely a coincidence. Rune is an abbreviation for Zune Revived, and I only realized this awkward situation today.
This UI is absolutely gorgeous.
It would be an interesting idea to design a phone around this style.
Hi, I'm the developer of Rune. Your idea is very interesting, and designing a phone like this is indeed my dream. However, it feels a bit too far off at the moment. I'm currently trying to build it on a Raspberry Pi. At the very least, I can create something similar to a Zune MP3 player, which is something I've always wanted to pursue.
Remember the zune tattoo?
Yes, he later tried to turn it into a Dick Cheney with a pentagram on his head tattoo. Now that Dick Cheney is a good guy, I wonder what will be next in the progression of the Zune tattoo's journey.
Zune will never die. Long live Zune.
Long live Zune.
Honestly, it looks super sleek and the README is a refreshing combination of briefness and useful info.
Wondering about more power-user features (as someone who did quodlibet -> mpd -> cmus -> my own https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/mus) such as gapless playback, ReplayGain, album instead of track shuffle, IPC and event reporting, possible headless mode, integration with projectM, etc...