Navi: Directory based music player

Navi is my attempt to create a user friendly, easy to use and featureful music player for Linux. There are already plenty of good music players available for Linux, for instance:

• Banshee - using C# (Mono), GTK+, Gstreamer
• Rhythmbox - C, GTK, Gstreamer
• Listen - Python, GTK
• xmms - Winamp-like
• Amarok - Qt(C++)
• Exaile - Python, influenced by Amarok, GStreamer

These players all have lots of features and extensibility, but what I was missing most in those players, was simple directory based music playing. My music collection is mostly organized by the use of directories:

Albums
    Boemklatsch
        Spontaneous Combustion
            CD 1
            CD 2
    Dr. Lektroluv
        Live at Lowlands 2010
    Hed Kandi
        Hed Kandi Ibiza 2010
            CD 1
            CD 2
            CD 3
Dance
    (400 files)
Game OSTs
    Bayonetta
    Mirror's Edge
    Dragon Age

I usually just play everything which is in one directory only. There was no real directory-based music player available for Linux (AFAIK...), and therefore I decided to just write my own. It also provided me a good reason to learn GStreamer and wxWidgets.

Current features

This is a list with the current implemented features:

• The obvious: play, pause, stop, seek, next and previous track;
• Directory based media browser;
• Internet radio stations (streaming audio). Can be added and removed, and are persisted to disk;
• Reading tags from streams and files;
• 'System tray' icon, for less display hassle in the window list in your Desktop environment (may have a buggy display);

Planned features

The following features are planned or work in progress:

• Caching system. If you have a large directory, re-reading all tags can be VERY tedious and time consuming. A sort of proxy is needed here;
• Preferences window (user preferences);
• Randomize the current directory-playlist;
• Favorites, play queue or the like is a must too;
• I'm also thinking of a full recursive 'playlist', i.e. using the base directory, find all media files within all the subdirectories. This will REALLY need caching :)
• OSD (On Screen Display) notification, to get notified which track is currently playing. This used to be implemented, but the prototypes in libnotify are not compatible amongst different versions :(

Technological information

For those interested, I am building the software with the following tools and libraries (aka dependencies)

• C++ programming language;
• wxWidgets 2.8.10+ for UI elements and the like;
• The excellent GStreamer 0.10.30+ as audio backend;

Build instructions

Navi is still in an alpha stage, so no pre-packaged version is available. You can however build the sources yourself. To do this, either download the zip file of the master branch here, or clone the Git repository:

git clone git://github.com/krpors/navi.git

Since it depends on wxWidgets, gstreamer and libnotify, you'll need to install those dependencies as well. For Debian based systems, you can invoke the following command:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libwxgtk2.8-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev

After installation of these packages, just run make on the Makefile:

make

And the binary will be built under the ./bin/ directory inside the Navi git repo. Run it with ./bin/navi, or else you'll get a warning about missing icons.

Feedback

If you are a user of Navi, you like or dislike what it is or where it's going to, please let me know! I'm fond of knowing if my software is being used. Just drop a small line.

Code critique are certainly welcome too!