[Muine] Some UI comments

[Lars Weber <lars brokenbits de>]

Hi everyone!

Now that I've found the time to read through the recent discussions on
this list, I'd like to make a few comments about the Muine user interface.
Please note that my comments at this time are completely based on the UI
as far as I can figure it out from the screenshots I've seen[1] and from
recent discussion on this list!  The reason is that I'm currently pretty
busy with other things (upcomming university exams for example) and
therefore don't have the time to really install Muine, yet :-/

Anyway, without much further ado:

Buttons
-------

One of the first things I wondered when I saw the screenshot was: "Why are
all the playback control buttons placed inside the main UI and not on a
toolbar as they would be with any other app?"

Personally I think that the correct place for both the
Prev/Play+Pause/Next buttons and the Add <foo> buttons would be on a
toolbar with a separator between the former group and the latter.

The loudness button is kind of special and might therefore better be
placed somewhere inside the main UI.

The advantage of toolbar buttons is not only that they are more standard,
but also that they are easier to hit because of their size in the default
configuration (without looking ugly).

Visualization
-------------

I seem to be in agreement with Jorn and others that visualization is a
gimmick that should only be added to the interface if it can be done in a
non-obtrusive way.

What I wondered now is whether it would perhaps make sense to make
possible visualizations an overlay to the main (i.e. playlist) window that
shows up after a certain time of inactivity and dissapears again as soon
as the user clicks onto the visualization.

Doing it that way would of course be pretty non-standard behaviour;
however, I see visualizations as a very special feature anyway and doing
it the way I suggest would have the advantage of not complicating the UI
at all except for a single entry or sub-menu (vis selection) in the View
menu.  Disabling this feature by default should further prevent confusion.

[ Now that I think about it I wonder whether Apple was doing something
similar with iTunes?  Or maybe it was just overlaying the playlist instead
of the whole window?  (Hmmm, this might also be a consideration as it
would allow track-skipping etc. while the visualization is active...) ]

Album Information
-----------------

Okay, before I now start voicing my opinion on what additional information
I'd like to see in the album selection, let me first state that I *do*
realise that a) different people will have vastly different opinions on
what information is most important to display and b) you can only display
so much information before the amount of displayed information makes the
list difficult to scan.

Therefore, please consider my opinion to be only one out of a large crowd
of different people!  The fact that only a small amount of information is
displayed is far more important to me than that my personal favourites are
among them!

Ok, so what are my personal favourites you ask?  Here they are:

Year of Release - Especially for artists that have released lots of albums
                  over a long period of time (e.g. Bob Dylan) the year
                  often gives a pretty good idea of the kind of music it
                  contains.

Type of Release - While this information is kind of redundant for official
                  album releases (and therefore should perhaps just be
                  omitted in these cases), in the situation where you have
                  e.g. several bootlegs of a certain artist in your
                  collection I think it would be pretty helpful if this
                  information would be displayed alongside the release.

As for the second item I don't know whether the common file formats
provide standard fields for the required information; however, musicbrainz
at least categorises releases accordingly[3] and in the case where a
release is not of type (Album, Official) I think it provides pretty useful
information.

I think it would be nice if other people would post their own favourites
here if they have different opinions (Genre is a likely candidate even
though I don't consider it to be very useful for my personal use).
Anyway, myself I'll try not to further comment on this topic as I've
already stated my opinion and in the end it's up to Jorn to decide upon
what information should be displayed anyway.  (Again, I'll happily accept
any decision even if it excludes my own favourites.)

Playing Track Indication
------------------------

IIRC this was something mentioned by Eugenia: that it was confusing that
played songs were selected in the list but that the selection could be
moved and therefor highlighting a track different from the currently
playing one (correct me if I'm wrong... as I said it's not possible for me
right now to check the current behaviour).  Eugenia (IIRC again) suggested
to use a different highlight color for selection and playing indication
and Jorn (yet another IIRC) said that he'd prefer to have the selection be
reset to the playing song in certain situations.

What I wondered was the following: "why not just use the already existing
speaker symbol as a playing indication and use the selection indication
for what it's meant to be used, i.e. to indicate what tracks are
selected."

The point is here that, if the users wouldn't be given the idea that the
selection indicates what song is playing, he would just be looking out for
the speaker symbol.  This approach seems to be the most straigt-forward
one and as long as the speaker is not an insufficient indication of the
playing song (which I wouldn't expect it to be) I don't see why there
would be any problems with it.

The End (for now)
-----------------

Ok, that's it for now.

I actually have some additional thoughts regarding the previous discussion
of groups, etc.  However, I haven't fully thought them through yet and
therefore will likely post them at some later time (unless I come to the
conclusion that they are completely bogus, in which case I'll keep them
for myself :-p).

There are also some more complex (and controversial) thoughts regarding
the handling of the music collection; but for those I'm missing the time
right now, so I'll also post them later.

... maybe tomorrow :-)

Regards,
Lars <- looking forward to the time he's using Muine to play his music!

[1] The fact alone that it seems pretty easy to get a clear idea of how
    Muine works just by looking at a single screenshot[2] suggests that
    you are quite a step ahead in terms of simplicity of both iTunes and
    Rhythmbox, which is great!

[2] http://people.nl.linux.org/~jorn/Muine/muine.png

[3] http://musicbrainz.org/popup/attrguide.html

Regards,
Lars