Planet Earth Software is a software house, currently building the best way to listen to recorded music - a PC based music playing program called Mars. We are currently looking for people to βeta test this program.

Please contact .

Gig Messenger

Gig Messenger is a website that emails you when your favourite bands are going to play.

It supports:

• Emails you when your favourite bands are going to play
• RSS feeds
• Searching for gigs
• Can add a search engine your web browser

Flight Messenger

Emails you when the flight you want is cheap on Grab a Seat.

Mars (in development)

Mars is a music player for the PC, designed to elegantly handle large music collections and help you discover new music. It aims to be the best way to listen to recorded music, and is currently being βeta tested.

With the ability to rate your favourite artists, albums and tracks, most of the time you can quickly browse just your favourites, but with one click you can view or search your entire collection. It takes just a few clicks to play your two favourite albums. You can also see the music your friends rate highly and what they have been listening to recently, giving you ideas about what to listen to when exploring their collection.

Mars' plug-ins integrate with Wikipedia, Google, Music Sites and online stores, so it only takes a few clicks to discover a band's latest album and start downloading it.

Features:

• Browse and find your favorite music quickly.
• Uncluttered display.
• Use your smart-phone/iPhone as a remote so you can select albums from the couch.
• Makes a feature of album art.
• View your friends' favorites and the music they have been listening to recently, e.g. after copying a friend's collection you don't just have thousands of albums to wade through.
• Plays MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, WAV, CDs and more.
• Robust.
• Music can be viewed and maintained by artist or album rather than as a sea of songs.
• Use last.fm to recommend new music based on your taste.
• Show history of the music you or your friends have played.
• Supports multiple users if your flatties don't share your taste in music.
• Plugins can be written in any programming language (interfaced like CGI):
  • Wikipedia musician information such as new releases.
  • When browsing new albums play songs released as singles.
  • Play the globally most popular songs of an artist
  • Surf similar artists an songs
  • Seach for torrents with music by an artist
  • Web server to control the player remotely, select music from your couch using your phone as a remote
  • Treat a folder of songs as a CD and automatically determine the correct names using CDDB

Screenshot:

Code quality

Mars is of a higher quality than our major compeditors, here are some files that cause competing programs to malfunction:

• This file causes Windows Media Player or Windows Explorer (open file properties) to stop working.
• Windows Media Player/Windows Explorer and iTunes don't read ID3 v2.4 tags, 6% of one music collection I analysed.

Development Progress

2.0 beta 3 (In development)

• Plugins:
  • Background: Use Wiimote as a remote. A real hassle as Microsoft only implemented half of the Bluetooth protocol on Vista
  • Background: Alarm plugin, set an alarm to raise in 3 minutes time, play the bells from Pink Floyd's Time song if you have it in your collections
  • Artist: all-music page, last.fm page, you tube search, google for torrents
  • Artist: Show similar artists from last.fm, HTML results hyperlinked to library window
  • Artist: Play or show n favourites from last.fm
  • Album: Play or show n favourites from last.fm
  • Album: Play tracks released as singles (from discogs.com)
  • Album: all-music page
  • AlbumInfo: Get cover and year from last.fm
  • Track: you tube search
  • Track: Show similar tracks from last.fm, HTML results hyperlinked to library window
  • Library: Play all favourite tracks (*** or better)
  • LibraryMaintenance: rename from CDDB loookup, rename from CDDB file/url
  • LibraryMaintenance: set track number from filenames
  • LibraryMaintenance: for compilations, title = artist - title, artist = various artits
• WebDAV ("Web Folders") support in the web server, so you can drag and drop and entire album or artist over the web.
• Ctrl-MouseWheel to change the volume
• Suport sharing music on a dynamic IP address, share URL should use the dynamic as a psuedo hostname, e.g. http://dynamic:2424
• Support serving files from behind a firewall if the client is visible or has port forwarded.
• Use Proxy servers
• Wizard for configuring sharing taste and music
• CD Writing using StarBurn SDK from The Ukraine
• Support multimedia keyboards
• Shift-Left and Shift-Right to jump 5 sec forward and back
• Override artist and album name when importing, get year and track number from tags when importing using regex, allow multiple imports until all files matches
• Import Dialog: Suport path and tag parsing, artist/album/track properties, renaming, skipping and plugins such as search-and-replace, replace-spaces and Capitalise
• Show window of newly imported Artists/Albums/Tracks
• Files tab for browsing file system
• Added search to Web Interface, lots of enhancements, more AJAX. Detect or select a mobile version of the interface. The iPhone makes a geat remote!
• Moved Path Templates configuration into into [Advanced...] in Library configuration. Check path templates as user enters them.
• Any volume adjustment unmutes as there is not obvious visual indication of muted state - to avoid screen clutter. Show [MUTED] in title bar if mute

• Infrastructure to support skins
• Object Orientates interface to Mars in Python
• Plugins can be written so you can continue to use Mars while the plugin is running, attached=true, attached=modal to stop Mars being accesable while th eplugin is running
• Plugin /event is now asyncronous with a timeout, so polling is efficient, Mars only replied to the plugin when an event is available
• Fixed: Update volume slide when adjust volume using Ctrl-Up or Ctrl-Down
• Separate the retrievel of share URLs from retreival of taste as with dynamic IP addreses the share URLs may change frequently, both HTTP transactions are sent concurrently.
• Fixed Del key not working in list window
• Show dynamic buffer status in Tools | Options | Output
• Optimized writing ID3 tags
• Fixed Winamp Input Plugin/AAC playback
• Read Xing VBR MP3 header.
• Rearchitected the playback threads/objects/interfaces, use Message Pipe for ITC, except for the main thread getting the track pos.

• Automatically store and retreive album covers at www.planetearthsoftware.com
  To quickly retreive album covers in an existing collection run Tools | Get All Album Info | Fast option.
• Copy or Move Files or Folders into the library, e.g. to import recent purchases or downloads
• Delete Artist, Album and Track (from properties dialogs)
• Removed Windows Explorer and Command Prompt from context menus are tagging, renaming and deleting are all implemented inside Mars now. Right click on background of properties dialogs still gives Windows Explorer and Command Prompt options.
• Web interface: Filter artist by rating, show album years and track numbers
• Ctrl-A selects all items, allows you to enqueue the whole collection
• bug: Repaint the screen properly on exit

• Fixed renaming an album's artist when the artist only has that album and tracks are parsed using tags
• Fixed setting album year and renaming album
• Fixed show individual menu when ony one item selected
• 118,000 lines of code, 252,000 including libraries

• Original Graphic Design
• Playlists in their own tab
• Automatically check for new Mars releases
• Split web-server plugin into web-control and web-sharing to simplify security, no need for allow-control/allow-download/whitelist/backlist
• Underline artist/album/playlist/track on mouseOver to indicate that clicking will perform a mutating action rather than selecting
• Plugins for All Music and Amazon
• Renamed "Skins" to "Colours"
• Install with a colours scheme for each of the 16ish HTML 4 colours

• Web server polling times and be tweaked by web server
• Infrastructure for skins
• 116,000 lines of code, 250,000 including libraries