Technogeek talk

I have this totally technogeeky idea running around in my head, so I have to put it somewhere.

A while ago, I read Adam Pash's article at Lifehacker about The Self-Sustaining iPod. Basically, it outlined how to use freely available software to rip CDs to MP3s, load the MP3s to your iPod's library and play music off of your iPod, all without iTunes. The additional benefit of all of the software used was that the programs were standalone apps which could be run off of your iPod when it's plugged in to a Windows system. So, your iPod could be free of iTunes or any other software which needed to be installed on a desktop.

Yes, I realize there's some downsides to this. You wouldn't get new iPod firmware updates, you couldn't buy music via the iTunes store, etc. But, if you didn't care about these things so much (which I don't), you could be unbound from needing to plug your iPod into one particular PC in order to get new music.

This recently got me thinking ... why can't someone build a music player which incorporates these ideas from the ground up? It wouldn't be difficult to build a music management app into the flash memory of a music player. Set it up to autoplay when the player is plugged in and build in all of the usual music management functions: rip CDs, manage podcasts, edit tags on music files, etc. But, instead of having to sync music from the desktop to the player, it can just work on the music files on the player. Seriously, this saves that whole synchronization step anyway.

At this point, Mac and Linux users are screaming, "What about our OSes, you Windows-centric hack?" Yeah, that's important, and it wouldn't be particularly difficult to build Mac and Linux versions of a music management app and include all of them in the player. Observe YamiPod: versions for all three major OSes and can be run standalone from an iPod.

Now, let's go one step further. If a smart company builds this music player and they publish the structure of the music library on the player or if they publish APIs for managing the library, third parties (read "open source developers") could build apps which interact with the music library. This could allow users to swap out the default music management app and install the open source app of their choice.

This is very much like the Google model of innovation ... create a platform and a way to interact with it, then let the vast community of developers innovate all kinds of things. Look at Google Maps. Google provides the platform (map data, satellite photos, street view photos) and APIs for web developers to use for interacting with the data and for embedding maps in their pages. The page known as Google Maps is just one app built on top of their mapping platform.

In the same way, this music player could be the platform (the physical hardware which plays the music) and the APIs for interacting with it. The music management app which is bundled with the player would be just one app on top of the platform, but developers could build many more.

Maybe Google will actually be the company to do this ... I think I get credit for being the first blog to discuss rumors of the secret Gplayer.

Maybe they'll build a player on top of Android. That doesn't sound like a too-far-out idea. And while I'm on the topic of Android, I wouldn't be totally surprised to see a developer somewhere create an app like this which can run on an Android phone and manage music on a microSD card in the phone.