Having had my little Sony MP3 player for a week now it’s just reminded me of the many failings of listening to tunes on any digital platform. Not even mentioning the lack of any tactile feedback from these devices, why does the software make it so hard to do what you want, which is just listen to the tunes you love?

Having bounced around from Winamp to Musicmatch and back, then onto XMMS and finally to a nasty hack I cobbled together myself, I still (to quote those noisy irishmen) haven’t found what I’m looking for…

Fine grained control of which tracks you like and which ones you don’t. A rating of one to five just doesn’t cut it anymore. (Well not for me…)

A random playback mode uses the preference data intelligently, plus details of when you played things to give a truly useful random play mode. (No more Scooter or thrash metal as you’re about to turn in…)

Totally transparent downloading of album and single art and lyrics, don’t keep asking me, just do it!

If you know of any tools out there that fit the bill then let me know…