[HN Gopher] Rune: A local music player reviving Zune's classic a...
___________________________________________________________________
Rune: A local music player reviving Zune's classic aesthetic
Author : march_happy
Score : 113 points
Date : 2024-10-05 05:15 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| march_happy wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://roriri.one/2024/10/04/rune/
| lawls wrote:
| Zune will never die. Long live Zune.
| losses wrote:
| Long live Zune.
| nesk_ wrote:
| This UI is absolutely gorgeous.
| ahoka wrote:
| It would be an interesting idea to design a phone around this
| style.
| losses wrote:
| 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.
| wiseowise wrote:
| I'm pretty sure grandparent is an ironic comment about
| demise of Windows (Phone) Mobile.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| When I first joined Microsoft in 2017, I was on the cellular
| team and was shocked to see how many people still used
| Windows Mobile (mostly in Europe)
| apollo_mojave wrote:
| 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.
| cxr wrote:
| Zune HD was released in 2009.
| whatever1 wrote:
| 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?
| dgellow wrote:
| If you stop paying the bill you still have access to YouTube,
| Spotify, and others
| Semaphor wrote:
| 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
| llm_trw wrote:
| We have much higher engagement entertainment than music to keep
| us occupied.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _What have we done?_
|
| You mean "what have _I_ done ".
| paulcole wrote:
| > 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!
| esskay wrote:
| This assumes you work on the principle of continuously buying
| new music. If you're someone with a library of ~2k songs and
| that doesnt change in any real way for years on end it
| probably doesn't stack up as well, especially when cd's are
| so darn cheap these days, being able to pick up ~5 full
| albums on CD for the price of 1 month streaming with little
| effort for example.
|
| Obvious point about not owning it either, so if an artist or
| whole label decides to have a fight with your streaming
| provider, sorry tough luck, you just lost them from your
| library.
| handity wrote:
| 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.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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'.
| Novosell wrote:
| Might Dopamine be of interest? It has a similar 3 pane
| interface at least.
|
| https://digimezzo.github.io/site/software
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| 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.
| jitl wrote:
| 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.
| philistine wrote:
| 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.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://youtu.be/-26xPkRXtsU
| philistine wrote:
| What you're describing is enlightening, thank you for
| sharing. The music purchasing workflow involved
| collaboration with the marketing people at Apple, which
| explains their successes.
| qingcharles wrote:
| What's funny is that Microsoft and its partners did all
| the groundwork to open up the labels and gave Apple an
| easy ride. I was working with Peter Gabriel and he could
| call any record label in the world and get us a meeting
| to show the demos. The startup I was working for would go
| in and it would spend a lot of energy proving to the
| labels that digital was the endgame and CDs were
| eventually going to die. This was a very hard job.
|
| And then a couple of weeks after each demo we'd get a
| call from the labels and they would tip us off that Apple
| had come to show them something special that they were
| working on, and of course that meeting went a lot easier
| than ours...
|
| (also every record label on Earth was using Macs not PCs,
| so Microsoft's software either had to be run on a laptop
| we took, or we had to show them Microsoft's absolutely
| awful Mac software. PG, bless him, gave me his personal
| iBook for testing (complete with all his passwords and
| AOL account), which he probably got from Jobs, but I was
| in a belligerent anti-Mac era so I shoved it in a closet
| with the button nailed down and stuck it on that "hold
| the button" game for two years)
| rglullis wrote:
| > locked in with hundreds of $ in iTunes purchases
|
| Wasn't one of the big selling points that songs bought on
| iTunes were DRM-free?
|
| (Sorry, I went to search and you are right: Apple went
| DRM-free only on 2009)
| qingcharles wrote:
| No. I was involved a lot in these early rights meetings
| and the labels were adamant that the tracks had to have
| DRM. All the early demos that got the labels on board had
| DRM, but all the consumers hated it, everyone at the
| labels actually hated it too, but I suspect their legal
| teams were forcing the issue. It took a big personality
| like Jobs, with a market-leading product to finally kill
| it.
|
| p.s. haven't Apple been sneaking DRM back onto their
| music lately? I know all the videos are DRM, right?
| jcheng wrote:
| The world was also not ready for music subscriptions. That
| was the really compelling benefit of Zune for me, that we
| take for granted today with Spotify et al. The vast
| majority of people I knew, even early adopter types, just
| could not wrap their head around the idea. "What happens
| when you stop paying? You're left with NOTHING!"
| qingcharles wrote:
| 100%. These were the arguments we had with Microsoft,
| Nokia etc. We tested subscriptions a lot in 2000-2004,
| but you have to remember, this was DOWNLOAD
| subscriptions. So what would happen is, if you failed to
| pay you ended up with a player or hard drive filled with
| thousands of "MP3" files that you could no longer play
| because the DRM license had expired. The customers were
| livid as fuck about this scenario.
|
| My argument was to have all-you-can-eat streaming
| subscriptions, but it was shot down, and at the time
| mobile data was pretty shitty (I built the original
| streaming service on a 9600bps GSM modem in 1999) so you
| could only stream at home.
| lovethevoid wrote:
| 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.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| It's what you get when you have design by comitee instead.
| firecall wrote:
| 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. ;-)
| dgellow wrote:
| Current windows UI and esthetics is pretty good imho, if you
| ignore the ads being pushed everywhere. I really like WinUI 3
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Zune never took off just like HoloLens, Band, Kinect and
| Windows Phone didn't take off--not because they were in any
| way late, but because Microsoft is never "all-in" with any of
| these ventures.
|
| The Xbox was somewhat of an anomaly owing to exclusives like
| Halo and Gears of War, but it's floundering, and in some
| countries, like Japan, it's just never taken off, period.
|
| Apple Vision doesn't seem to be a sensation in terms of sales
| figures, despite the HoloLens beating Apple to the punch, and
| the stereotypical nonsense being "Apple is always late, but
| they always do it right". HoloLens just got killed along with
| Windows Mixed Reality.
|
| Hell, even the Microsoft Band beat the Apple Watch to market.
|
| The problem is that merely having a presence in a niche
| doesn't guarantee success as it once did. Now, you need to
| actually iterate, innovate, and satisfy the minimum expected
| threshold of solving real problems. This is also what Tim
| Cook's Apple struggles with these days.
|
| What's the killer app for Apple Vision? What was it for
| HoloLens?
|
| When digital technology was new and exciting, having anything
| would draw buyers. Now, we're spoiled for choice, things move
| fast, it isn't years between models, it's months to a year.
| Early adopters tend to get a bad experience too.
| yndoendo wrote:
| Apple controls the full driver stack while Microsoft does
| not. I've had to re-work HID interaction on Windows with
| WinForms and WPF to work around problematic touch interface
| drivers on Windows 7 and 10.
|
| Microsoft is more towards licensing software to make money
| versus making a quality product top down.
| ralphc wrote:
| Where can I get the Zune download? Searching on Zune just shows
| me the hardware.
| alavry wrote:
| Copies of the installer are on archive.org - try one of
| these:
|
| https://archive.org/details/zune-package_202204
| https://archive.org/details/zunepackage_4.8.2345.0
| vips7L wrote:
| I saw this cool metro theme for JavaFX a while back:
| https://www.pixelduke.com/java-javafx-theme-jmetro/
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Can you download Zune for Windows 11? I have a couple of Zunes
| I would love to put back in service.
| keyle wrote:
| 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!
| losses wrote:
| 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.
| keyle wrote:
| Thanks for the response, good to know.
| bn-l wrote:
| Remember the zune tattoo?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
| xenodium wrote:
| 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.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| 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.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| 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?).
| albertzeyer wrote:
| 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.
| losses wrote:
| 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.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| 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...
| losses wrote:
| I've taken a note and try to pick features that triggered my
| curiosity, thanks for your suggestions! Btw, headless mode is
| already something but really rough.
| cageface wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://github.com/fzyzcjy/flutter_rust_bridge
| losses wrote:
| However, Rune uses `rinf`, and I prefer the architecture design
| of `rinf` as it organizes data communication more clearly :P
| cageface wrote:
| 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.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I wonder if any naming inspiration was taken from Roon, a very
| good music player.
| losses wrote:
| 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.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Gonna be confusing when I recommend Roon to people. They might
| think I'm talking about this.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-10-05 23:01 UTC)