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After flaccing my CD collection I am trying to move to a media player solution. Given the limitations of boxed solutions I opted for the NAS–Player/server–DAC approach to connect into my older stereo system. On the storage and DAC side I am fairly OK. I start with Synology NAS and use Chromecast Audio at the other end. Once that operates smooth I will start replacing elements until quality gets sufficientlly close to what I get from my CDs. Key open issue is the player software. Being used to full graphics software solutions I am surprised by the lack of evolution in this area. I’ve looked at a dozen players named on this forum. Many of them appear to be great in expanding on all kinds of side functions like DSP but none of them seems to master the core capability of music selection. They get stuck on the basic mp3/vorbis tagging functions, with at best the ability to include more complex search capabilities. Done by typing text. Huh? No drag/drop on touch screens? I thought we went past that when touch screens were introduced almost fifteen years ago. In trying to fit the medieval tagging model I've already wasted more time retagging my collection than I spent flaccing it. I want a graphical solution. I don’t want to search 10,000 files typing in text in a smartphone or tablet. I want to search audio files the same way as I browse CDs in my cabinet, or books in my library. I have thirty pianists performing Debussy preludes. In my cabinet I group my favorites into one section of the Debussy collection, and rather than typing in some unspeakable pianist name I know from the color on the back side of the album that it is this performance that I want to hear. I can do exactly this with my e-book collection. Why not the same for audio? Player requirements: Present the indexed information initially in one or more overview screens/pages (albums, artists, etc.) on my remote (smartphone/tablet) identical to the app overview on android. Alphabetic is good enough. Next I want to create a series (10+) of personal screens/pages each focused on my preferred music display. One for Debussy, one for African Jazz, one for Metal, another one for recently bought music, etc. If I wanted to recreate my wooden CD cabinet that should be feasible as well. From the general overview screens I can now drag/drop music icons into the personal screens to build my music collection. Some icons I may want to use in more than one personal screen. Nothing new: We all do this with apps on our tablets. Of course these are only graphical representations of a database. The actual files stay where they are. Just like on any tablet screen I can further create grouped icons. Getting rid of a music icon (which could be an album or song) from a screen should be as easy as dragging it to a “remove” icon, like on an android (or iOS) screen. If an icon is an album I can click on it to open it and hide those songs I always hated but had to suffer through because they were part of the album. Again, the original files are not touched. If I want to delete the audio file I can drag it to a garbage icon in the general alphabetic music screen. Each screen/page has one or more “playlist/queue” icons allowing me to drag/drop an icon for playing or create a list for future use. I can quickly browse my entire collection by swiping back and forth between my screens to select items for the queue. Speech control is an obvious adder functionality. Import/export: XML-based. No different than other database structures. As you can see, these items are all very standard and have been implemented in many forms. Take a look at the software solutions that exist for e-books and photo albums. It should be straightforward to create something like this for audio. Have I overlooked a player with this capability or are we still in the stone age of players? Appreciate your suggestions! Cheers

Does anyone have any ideas on whether XLD can be used with other databases than freeDB or musicbrainz? And if so, how to do it? I have over 3000 classical CD's to rip and the lack of proper and consistent metadata for classical music is a challenge.. The Kaleidescape system really seems to be doing a pretty good job and uses the All Music Guide, but I have no idea if it is possible to integrate AMG-based data with XLD for ripping. I have searched high and low on the forums for answers but could not find any. If I missed something please let me know. Thanks!