As for aero tiles... That's a Win8 thing? I guess it's a valid complaint. I think you can set global keyboard shortcuts for those actions, if that helps.
Aero is a vista+ thing. Hover over a playing vlc in the taskbar and you see skip/pause/play.
Foobar is classic to the cost of UX. We've figured out for a long time now bigger buttons are important, there's no need for separate pause/play especially if stop is right there.
It doesn't need a slew of crappy gradients and fancy shit, Just drag the interface forward a decade that's all. Usable with a touch screen should be a minimum now.
Ah, thank you. ncmpcpp looks great (and I imagine I can connect it to an mpd instance running on a separate computer), but it's really important for me to not have a window in my alt+tab list.
I'll try XMMS, I have tried it before but it never "clicked". I'll give it another shot, thanks!
You see, I was a very avid fan of winamp(2) about 10 years ago. Nothing else came close. Then onto linux, xmms did the trick (as all I needed was a winamp2 replacement). Then as my collection grew, my priorities change, I was after speed. So mpd was thing. In the past few years I haven't had a personal collection, now it's more often listening to music on grooveshark/youtube. After grooveshark went down, I got spotify (paid subscription), and I find myself being _stunned_ how bad, how slow, how ugly, how anti-UX it is. I think I may go back to having the collection on my HDD once again with mpd as that is still really fast. But that'll be difficult, as I'm often on the go and want to listen to stuff on my cell phone (where spotify is okay actually).
I have exactly the same experience as you. My solution is Google Music, where I basically just upload all my own music and I can listen to it on my phone. It's a bit of a hassle to keep the two synced, but not as much hassle it is to be listening to music in a browser window that takes up loads of RAM, as if playing an mp3 is some intractable problem.
It's 2015 and I can't "alt-tab" into spotify in order to pause/play by pressing space; I have to click somewhere in the upper half of the interface in order to "refocus", or the spacebar just scrolls down. Which is useful for something, I guess.
Though this is on Ubuntu, and Spotify is still a beta app on that platform last I checked. I don't think I've had this problem on Windows.
Check out the Arch Linux wiki on this. Spotify apparently plays nicely with the rest of your desktop and you should be able to set up media key short cuts.
I made a script that plays/pauses Spotify through dbus, which I usually execute by opening dmenu. :)
My keyboard has media keys, but I thought I would prefer short textual commands to having to move my hand to the upper right of my keyboard (and probably miss the key if I wasn't looking?).
Yeah media keys are annoying and not present on lots of keyboards. You could map this script via your window manager to something like special-F5 through to special-F8 to back-play/pause-stop-forward...
In Ubuntu Unity, you can just click on the sound icon in the top right corner of the screen and click pause. Or you can use the pause button on your keyboard, if you have one.