[emms-help] EMMS is great stuff, thank you!

[Nix]

The last major thing I used that nasty raw Unix system for has been
replaced: now my Linux box is a platform for running X and (X)Emacs on,
as it should be. :)


EMMS still nearly works on XEmacs (21.5.28), in case you were worrying
that it might have suddenly stopped for whatever reason.

I've got some patches if anyone wants them: a one-liner fixing an XEmacs
compatibility bug, and a rather larger patch adding support for the
performer and composer tags. (I'm wondering if it would be possible to
rejig things so that tags could be added more easily, but it's sort of
hard because tag-related things are bound to keys in things like the tag
browser.)

I can send a couple of darcs bundles emms-patches-wards if anyone thinks
they'll be interested.


In any case, further patches are likely to be forthcoming. Immediate
things I can see myself adding:

 - a `people' tag, like Quod Libet, which shows you *all* of composers,
   performers, and artists: the browse mode for this would split the
   three at the top level, so you could distinguish.

 - logarithmic seeking: it would be nice to go back and forward in
   increasingly large jumps the longer you seek for.

 - classical-suitable shuffling, basically another shuffle function
   driven by a list of genres and/or directories (optionally
   predicate-driven, of course) within which shuffling does not change
   the order of tracks within an album (/ movements within a work). I
   rarely want to hear the movements of e.g. concertoes shuffled into
   random order, but I'd quite like to be able to stick on a playlist of
   all the classical music I own and say `play these works in random
   order'. (Exactly one media player that I've found to date can do
   this, and that's because I added the feature to that as well. I guess
   there aren't many classical music listeners using MP3 players,
   probably because most classical music listeners are about eighty
   years old.)

Features I can't add yet but will in time:

 - proper, permanently accurate synchronization of playlists and
   playing time with MPD. (This requires the implementation of the
   WIP MPD listener protocol first.)


In case anyone's interested, or wants to laugh at me, my EMMS config is
fairly weird (and probably buggy what with my having used it for all of
a day): <http://www.esperi.org.uk/~nix/xemacs/personal/init-music.html>.

It uses a number of XEmacs-21.5-only features like modeline controls,
and reimplements much of the modeline support as a consequence. It also
reimplements several MPD core functions to rejig them to prefer
composers over artists, which is not something I expect anyone other
than me to do. (I use `artist' in place of `performer', so a lot of my
classical stuff has both `artist' and `composer' tags, in which case I
want to prefer `composer'.)