rory ok's dashboard

J River Media Jukebox is probably the best media player out there at the moment (I think most people are put off by the name, it sounds like a piece of junk) but I'd prefer to be using something open source and free like songbird. However Jukebox has features that keep me coming back.

One of the best of these is a thing called 'View Schemes'.

Different 'Views', similar to the library in Songbird, are displayed in a left hand sidebar, just like an explorer window. However, more than one can exist, and each can have different sort/filter parameters. Imagine you could create a second virtual library on songbird, that only contained tracks from your soundtracks folder in your music collection, or totally excluded any audiobooks you have? I have both of these set up in Jukebox, and I find them indispensable. without them my random playlist would be regularly filled with chapters out of the middle of audiobooks, which I obviously don't want.

There's room for all sorts of filters then.
Only list artists who have their own subfolder.
Only list artists who have more than one album
Only list ogg files.
Only list artists in the rock genre
List artists by Rating, Genre or Keyword

Some of this functionality could overlap with the preview panes (ratings, genres etc), but I think its far more intuitive to be able to attach a permanent filter, or view to the sidebar, than having to scroll through preview panes to find one tag. Dragging a tag from a preview pane could even become a way of setting up a view.

to sum up, I'd love to be able to start songbird and go straight to a list of soundtracks

removing missing files from the library and updating location information should not be something I have to go download an add-on for. SongBird should remove entries from the library that have no corresponding files - e.g: files that have been renamed outside of songbird.