Re: [Muine] Song information dialog

[Lars Weber <lars brokenbits de>]

Jorn Baayen <jbaayen gnome org> wrote:
> Alright, finally. Sorry for the - extreme - delay.

Ok, no problem ... I too have a few additional comments that I wanted to
have send quite a while ago :)

> You're probably right. Although in the ideal case, people would only
> have legally ripped music, which generally means correct tags. That
> sort-of is the kind of user I am aiming at with Muine. 

But even with users that only have self-ripped music there will be
situations where they would want to do at least minor tweaks to the song
information (i.e. fix spelling errors).  And don't forget that there
actually *do* exist legal (and semi-legal) ways to download music from the
internet for example, and the tagging of these files is not always ideal.
(Not to mention music imported from the users pre-auto-tagger life, etc.)

> I really like these .. I've added links to these shots to the TODO list.

Ok, will remember not to delete them when cleaning up the next time :)

> > > > > > > 2. We want it to display the following information, at least:
> > > > > > > - Song title
> > > > > > > - Song artists
> > > > > > > - Song performers, if any
> > > > > > > - Year of release
> > [...]
> I think we do need something like this. Because not all tracks have an
> album associated to them.

The question is whether there's really any information for such a dialog
to display that's not already visible elsewhere in the ui.

Of the things you mention above the only thing that's new information is
"Year of release", and while it's certainly possible for individual tracks
to have a release date even though they don't have an associated full
release (e.g. album, single, ...) it's certainly not that common and I
wonder whether it's worth the ui-overhead to expose such dates (reminds me
of the word micro-managment ... and, yes, I'm still the same person that
recently tried to make a point for exposing the dates of full releases in
the ui ;).

Ok, I can actually see two more reasons to provide a info dialog for
individual tracks:
  1. Play length (which is currently visible in the main ui, but only when
     the song is playing)
  2. Artists / Performers in situations where only part of them are
     displayed in the main ui/library because of space constraints
Not sure whether these can't be handled in a better way.  Anyway, I'm not
strictly opposed to providing info dialogs for individual files, just
wondered whether they are really needed / useful.

Btw: at least conceptually all the interesting information would perhaps
ideally be displayed somehow directly in the main ui or the library
(i.e. with additional dialogs only for editing).  However, that gets us
back to the previous argument about how to display such information in a
non-obtrusive way and as we found out already it's not easy to do in
reality :-/

Another btw: one thought that recently came to my mind when looking at the
footer of the Fedora homepage (fedora.redhat.com) was whether it might
work to display secondary album information in the album list by
displaying it in a lighter color (e.g. something like #808080) in addition
to maybe a smaller font.  Might pose problems however with certain default
color schemes.

> But this raises the question.. what do we do when a user asks
> information on the playing song? Do we launch the single track dialog,
> or the album info dialog, with the tracks tab opened and the playing
> track selected? Or do we make it depend on whether the song has an
> associated album or not?

That depends at least partially on how the information is accessed
generally.  If there were two separate entries in the menus for "Track
Info" and "Album Info" the obvious thing would be to show whatever dialog
the user asked for and to don't let him ask for album information if no
such information is available ;)

Regards,
Lars