Re: [Muine] Song information dialog

[Jorn Baayen <jbaayen gnome org>]

On Mon, 2004-04-05 at 21:15 +0200, Lars Weber wrote:

> > 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.)

Yeap, true.

> 
> > 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 :)

K. :)

> 
> > > > > > > > 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.

While I agree it seems kind of pointless, I still thinik we need it,
because:
- Performers are not displayed in the "add song" dialog, or the main
playlist - so this would be the only way to get to see them.
- Nor are dates

Performers are reasonably important. And dates are too I think.. "hey,
this is one fancy song. when did he release it?"

> 
> 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 :-/

Yea.. that would be ideal. But in reality too hard to do. But I think we
probably have a reasonable balance for most people now.

> 
> 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.

Hrm.. we would still have the same constraints as we have now. It would
get very cramped - unless we make the album listitems bigger, which is
also less than ideal imho.

> 
> > 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 ;)

Yeap. Good one. This one sucks for the tray though- it'd be cool to be
able to quickly get album/song information through there. Having two
menuitems for that would be a bit much though, in the tray .. 


Cheers,

Jorn