I've started to write this media player a few times, but get distracted.
A digital music manager should be at least as good as a physical shelf of albums that you sort, browse, and select; otherwise what's the point? No digital music player has accomplished even that.
Some enhancements a digital album-centric manager would provide over physical items on shelves are: searching and sorting via metadata, putting albums in multiple "Shelves", and tracking listening statistics (not as an aggregate of track statistics, but at the album-level).
My would-be media manager also supports "Mixtapes" (like playlists, except in set order and ideally with a length limit) which can be placed on Shelves alongside released Albums. Similarly, long "Live Recordings" have first-class status like Albums and Mixtapes and can be put on Shelves (even though they may be a single "track"/file). Finally, dynamic playlists of tracks are replaced by "Dynamic Shelves" of Albums/Mixtapes/Recordings, so you can quickly get to your recent-most-played or highly-played-you-haven't-played-recently, but always as sets of songs that should be listened to together, in order.
A digital music manager should be at least as good as a physical shelf of albums that you sort, browse, and select; otherwise what's the point? No digital music player has accomplished even that.
Some enhancements a digital album-centric manager would provide over physical items on shelves are: searching and sorting via metadata, putting albums in multiple "Shelves", and tracking listening statistics (not as an aggregate of track statistics, but at the album-level).
My would-be media manager also supports "Mixtapes" (like playlists, except in set order and ideally with a length limit) which can be placed on Shelves alongside released Albums. Similarly, long "Live Recordings" have first-class status like Albums and Mixtapes and can be put on Shelves (even though they may be a single "track"/file). Finally, dynamic playlists of tracks are replaced by "Dynamic Shelves" of Albums/Mixtapes/Recordings, so you can quickly get to your recent-most-played or highly-played-you-haven't-played-recently, but always as sets of songs that should be listened to together, in order.