EarCandy is a music juke-box that will present music collections in the somewhat novel way of artist, album, title, regardless of the underlying directory structure.

This is the way that iNoize, a p2p music sharing company, presented music. I worked at iNoize for 18 months and really liked the approach, unfortunately, I do not like web based juke boxes ;-) (I think web ui's are too limiting for the user and the developer).

EarCandy is written in Python using (currently) the Gtk toolkit for the user interface. I will eventually switch to AnyGui for the ui once they release a stable version.

EarCandy uses an external player to play tracks. Under Unix/Linux the only player currently supported is xmms. It needs to be running in order to play music, ie EarCandy will no start it for you. And under Windows, winamp is supported.

The main script to run is 'earcandy.py', cd into the directory and './earcandy.py' to run the application. Windows users, just run earcandy.exe.

The first time it runs, it will ask for the path to you're music files. Enter the path and click on 'OK'. It will then scan that path for mp3 files and add them to an index. It saves the index file, so it only has to this once. You will be able to rescan the directory if you add new tracks to rebuild the index.

The main window consists of 4 list boxes. In order:
· Collections Eventually you will be able to add external collections and reference the music within. They are listed here.
· Artists is the list of all artists in the collection.
· Albums is the list of albums for the selected artist.
· Tracks is the list of tracks for the selected album.

To play an album or track, simple double click on it. There is also a context menu when the right mouse button is pressed on a album or track. For albums, this menu contains items to play the album and enqueue the album. It is similar for tracks.

Enqueing allows a album or track to be added to the list of songs being played in the music player without disturbing what is being played.