Rating system or thumbnails? Edit

The sheer number of available clients makes this page terrible for someone searching for one. A simple set of thumbnails (possibly with a version number underneath) or a some sort of ratings system (which I'll admit is non-trivial to implement in a Wiki) would go a long way.

It does a major disservice to MPD, as it's an incredibly powerful daemon, and that's not reflected in well over half of the clients. A first impression can be important for software, and being introduced to MPD via, say, GMPC would be useful for the sole purpose of clarifying to a user how useful the server really is.

- I think something along the lines of the feature matrix would be a good start. I think most people know what they want from a client. Currently it's a tedious task to find the features supported by most clients since a lot of the client pages don't properly list them. I also have the feeling a lot of the clients listed are not getting much development TLC any more. Maybe there could be a way to determine the usefulness of a client. This should decay after some time as it doesn't keep up with evolving tool-kits, libraries or features in mpd. This decay is probably not very noticeable for cli clients or scripts for instance as they tend to focus on a more narrow spectrum. There could be a special section dedicated to the clients that do work but are not fully functional or based on obsolete versions of tool-kits/libraries. I am willing to spent some time on investigating clients, but since there are so many I don't think I can do this on my own. Tarmack 19:45, June 26, 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps it makes sense to handle the list of clients and ratings externally. The architecture of sites like gnome-look.org, kde-look.org, etc would be perfect. They are hosted by opendesktop.org, If we just got a section dedicated to MPD clients and linked to that page from here, it would be perfect. openDesktop.org Cseickel 00:11, June 27, 2010 (UTC)

The interface of opendesktop.org seems like a step forward. Although, and this might just be me, I find it hard to find anything there. If I'm looking for an application with specific features I might just as well use google. In my opinion they focus way to much on popularity. If where moving away from the wiki, I think something that can match by tags or the like would be better. Best would be if the user could specify a set of features or properties he/she expects in the client (e.g. a file browser and using Qt). Tarmack 01:00, June 27, 2010 (UTC)

Ultimately, the best case scenario would be a custom web app just for this purpose, with well defined feature tags and a rating system. I'd love to build such a system, but the problem is reliable and free hosting. I think realistically we'd need to choose an existing system that caters to open source projects. Possibly, a spreadsheet on Google docs could be a simple solution. The wiki just can't do a good job with this, and the feature matrix is a nightmare to edit. Cseickel 18:35, June 27, 2010 (UTC)

One possibility would be to use the webhosting at SourceForge.net since the project is also hosted there. It is free although maybe not as reliable as one would wish. I'm not very experienced with web development but I would love to contribute in any way I can. Tarmack 16:28, June 28, 2010 (UTC)

I don't think SourceForge hosting provides a database backend, which is what we would really need. I just discovered that the wiki on google code projects can be customized to be exactly what we need. I'll setup a project to track clients soon... Cseickel 21:15, July 2, 2010 (UTC)

What a pile of junk! Edit

So I just downloaded and tried every single web-client on this page. NOT ONE of them works. That's a pretty poor picture you're painting here. The closest thing to "functional" is orangePlayer, which at least plays music and in principle handles its playlist - but it cannot actually browse into a directory to add a single file to the playlist - all it can do is add a whole directory. As it appears neither can any one of the others. Weak - very weak. The original one (phpMp) does not actually do anything at all when one clicks on anything in the GUI. Has anybody around here ever heard of quality control?