Rockaway is a highly flexible, maximalist music player written in Python. I am writing it, first and foremost, for myself as an audiophile and a music lover with a large library. I initially used iTunes to organize and play my music, enjoying the large number of features and options it afforded for organizing my music. (But not its continually increasing size). I switched to Banshee when I stopped using Windows for everything except gaming, writing a variety of Python scripts that interact with its SQLite backend to recreate the iTunes capabilities it lacks. I have been happily using Banshee for the last six or so years, but am looking for something that is actively supported and with more of the power I enjoyed from iTunes, minus the cruft. As a Python programmer with over five years of software development experience, this seems like the perfect time to realize my old dream of writing my own music player.
More succinctly, my priorities for Rockaway are the following:
- Power user features such as I used to enjoy in iTunes--defining smart playlists with arbitrary boolean expressions, assistance keeping music files and the database in sync
- Optimized performance on large (tens of thousands of songs) libraries.
- Python scripting capability to allow users to extend Rockaway even more easily than I extended Banshee.
- An flexible graphical interface with a fully customizable layout and a loose coupling to the backend.
- Customizable hotkeys, including the option to control the player while it is out of focus.
- Built-in analytics for exploring your listening history (maybe no one else is interested in this feature, but I am).