A piece of music is a document like any other in Desktop Minder, and like the others it is meant to do two things: be listened to, and be edited. The listening is well along. A track opens with its cover on it, a whole library opens to be browsed by artist, album or genre, and one Jukebox plays the lot. The editing is only half there: you can change everything about a recording—its tags, its cover, its number, its name, its format—but not yet the sound itself.

Where It Stands

Listening

A Track

Double-click a track and it opens in the View with its cover on it: the picture in its tags if it has one, because that's the one whoever tagged it chose; otherwise a picture named as the cover in the album's folder, or failing that in the artist's. Its tab says Listen. Unlike a film, a track doesn't start by itself. It is opened to be seen—its picture, its length, its facts—and played when you press Play. Under the picture is the usual transport: a rail to move through the song, the time, rewind, play, fast forward and volume. The Properties panel on the right has the rest: title, artist, album, year, genre, length, bit rate, frequency, bit depth, channels and quality.

MP3, FLAC, WAV, M4A and Ogg files open this way; anything else goes to whatever Windows would have opened it with. The playing is done by LibVLC, the engine inside VLC—but inside Desktop Minder, not as a program of its own. Select a track without opening it and the Viewer panel on the right will play it too. Previewing something and opening it are the same act at two sizes, not two different features that happen to look alike.

Scores

A MIDI file is a score, not a recording: it says which notes to play, not what they sound like, and a player has no orchestra of its own. Opened directly, a score used to be a black screen and silence. So Desktop Minder has it performed first, once, by FluidSynth with a SoundFont for its voices, and then plays the performance like any other recording. Convert to FLAC keeps that performance as a file beside the score. Without FluidSynth the command is grayed, and says what it is waiting for, and a score you open goes to Windows instead.

The Jukebox

There is one Jukebox, a tab on the right-hand strip, because there is one pair of speakers and one listener. Whichever desktop you're on borrows it. You fill it by dragging tracks or whole albums into it from a pane, a folder or File Explorer, or with Play Now, Play Next and Play Last, which are on the menu of every track and of every folder with music in it. Never by clicking: a click is looking, and looking at an album must not quietly line it up.

Its rows show song titles and album covers rather than file names; a playlist showing file names is showing its own plumbing. Drop in an album you have in more than one form and it plays the best copy of each song: lossless before lossy, then the better grade, then the higher bit rate. Cross-fading follows rules you set, and can take its cue from the genre. The queue is remembered from one session to the next, down to the place in the current song—but nothing plays until you ask, because a program that starts making a sound of its own accord is a program that gets closed.

And only one thing sounds at a time. Start a film, a song in the View, a video on a web page or a clip in the Wikipedia panel, and whatever else was playing goes quiet. Putting a page or a film out of sight doesn't silence it, though: you might be following a podcast on a page you've moved away from. (The Viewer panel is the exception; shut it, and it stops.)

Music Libraries

A drive or folder laid out the usual way, artists and then albums, can be made into a library: Scan Music Library on its menu. From then on, opening it from a pane gives you the library rather than the folder. (Inside a folder listing, for now, a double-click still just browses into it.) The library says how many artists, albums and tracks there are; its View menu offers All Tracks, Artists, Albums and Genres; and a search box looks through titles, albums, artists and genres at once. Double-click a track and it opens in the View, cover and all, ready to play. An artist or an album opens as the folder it is. A genre, which has no folder of its own, is gathered into one, of shortcuts, that lists and queues like any other. Open Launcher puts the library's artists and albums on the left-hand strip as panes of their own.

The first scan reads everything; Rescan Music Library reads only the albums that have changed, and can be stopped between artists without harm. The library file lives with the music—on the server, if that's where the music is—and each machine opens a copy of its own, checked against the original no more than once an hour.

Editing

Everything About the Sound

Edit Tags, on one recording or fifty, opens a sheet in the View with every field the files have: title, artist, album, album artist, track and disc numbers, year, genre, composer, conductor, comment, lyrics and the rest, plus any field you care to add—MOOD, CATALOG, anything at all. Each is a box you can type in or choose from. Where the files disagree it says < keep >, and leaving it alone leaves each file as it was. The Cover box shows the picture, with buttons to choose a new one, save it out, or take it off every file, and it takes a new one dropped on it. A lone recording with no tags at all opens with its title and number already guessed from its file name. There is no OK button: what you change is written a minute after you stop, or the moment you put the sheet down, and only the fields you touched, and only in the files where they differ.

Copy Tags and Paste Tags carry one recording's tags, cover and all, to another, or several to several in order—except ReplayGain, which describes one particular recording and means nothing on any other. Set Track Numbers... is Mp3tag's numbering wizard, because that's where people already know it from, so album after album is OK, OK, OK; in a folder sorted by None, it numbers the tracks in the order you've dragged them into. Normalize Filename renames a track from its tags, as [01] First Song.flac, filling in any missing tags from the old name first. Convert to makes a copy in another format beside the original. And in a folder listing, a track's number, title, artist, album and album artist can be typed over right where they are, the way Mp3tag does it.

The Quality column grades every track, from XQ for genuine high resolution down to LQ, by what the recording is rather than by its bit rate alone. Nothing here measures ReplayGain or trims silence; that's what Music Minder is for.

The Sound Itself

What there isn't yet is an Edit tab beside Listen: a way to cut a recording, join two, take out a cough or shorten a silence. The thinking behind it is already written down, in the design of the video editor. There, a recording, like a film, is a collection of moments—one long one to begin with, which can be split, trimmed and rearranged, with a split changing the instructions and never the recording—and every layer of a video has a lane for sound beneath its lane for pictures. The program's way of pointing at things already allows for the rest: among the things it is meant to be able to point at, and ask what can be done to, is "a stretch of silence in a recording." Right-click one, and the menu will be about that silence, the way a picture's menu is about the color you pointed at.

Putting Things Together

An open track takes nothing dropped on it yet; try, and it says so. But sound already mixes with other kinds of document in a few places. A picture dropped on the tag sheet's Cover box becomes the cover of every recording on the sheet, and any picture in an album's folder offers Set as Album Cover, which writes it into every track there. The Jukebox takes tracks, albums and shortcuts to them from anywhere, File Explorer included. And a track drags out of any pane or folder listing as the file it is.

The next step is the video editor, where sound files dropped on a video's layers land in its sound lanes.

Progress

• 26 September 2026—The design of the video editor describes a recording as a collection of moments, and gives sound its own lane beneath every lane of pictures.
• By 1 October, when the project's detailed history begins—everything under Listening above but the one-sound-at-a-time rule, and everything about the sound under Editing, was already working.
• 1 October—The tag sheet's cover box moves onto the program's new, shared rules for dragging and dropping. That evening, one thing sounds at a time: whatever starts playing quiets everything else, and a page put out of sight goes on playing.