Music players are a great example of a type of app that at first brush seems simple and difficult to do badly, but in reality is littered with subtleties and bits that hinge on the preferences of the user, all of which can make or break the app.
Makes it easy to understand why there’s more players than can be counted but few worth using.
That's because they all try to be more than they should be. I don't need or want a visualization option. I don't need or want an equalizer. I don't need or want a library. Those functions properly belong in other places or in the waste bin. My music library is on my filesystem and is sorted and arranged as I prefer. When I want to play an album I drag it over to MPC-HC. When I want to create a custom playlist, I open the playlist and drag songs over in the order I want. I don't need a psychedelic visualization, my use case for playing music on my pc is as background audio. The function of an equalizer is to make up for shortcomings in my speakers and belongs there. The media player should convert an encoded file into PCM data to be shoved out the DAC. Leave the file managing to my file manager. The sound shaping to my speakers. And the crap frequency domain visualizations in the trash.
Putting the equalizer upstream at the speaker level means that all of your audio is affected by it. And yet there are many times where I am playing certain types of music, such as classical or tracker impulse chiptune that needs some adjustments - i'd much rather be able to adjust it at the playlist and/or player level.
The advantage of a music player that builds a library from a set of folders is that it's infinitely faster to be able to do fuzzy searches particularly around metadata such as Idv3 tags.
I’ve of two minds on this. On one hand I agree, because the more functionality a music player has the more likely some of it will miss the mark, but on the other hand I find file managers as they currently exist are somewhat inadequate and incapable of fully replacing a library management system in a music player.
Without going too far out into the weeds, lack of integration between filemanagers/filesystems and music players is the main problem. File managers aren’t conducive to sorting by audio file metadata - even those that support it force the user to manually enable those columns in list mode and support is spotty across file formats, meaning the user has to fall back on “hacks” like modifying filenames to sort properly when sorting by name.
Additionally, the browser-type design that’s dominant in file managers doesn’t lend to versatile use with other programs.
This is one area where I think BeOS had the right idea. There, audio metadata was accessible by way of the filesystem which made it easy to access by applications and meant that the file manager more robustly supported sorting by that metadata. Additionally, the file manager was similar to that of Classic Mac OS where windows were dead simple and each represented a single folder, which made it easy to use a file manager window as a playlist window.
Makes it easy to understand why there’s more players than can be counted but few worth using.