Re: [Muine] Groups and the main UI

[Lee Willis <lee leewillis co uk>]

On Fri, 2004-02-06 at 09:07, Jorn Baayen wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-02-06 at 09:46, Lee Willis wrote:
> > 
> > http://www.leewillis.co.uk/muine/add_album_mockup.png
> > 
> > I know Jorn doesn't think this is particularly useful, however having
> > used Media Player 9 for some time now it is actually very useful since I
> > can often remember the name of an artist, but not the album, or vice
> > versa!
> 
> Hm.. atm I still fail to see how this changes anything.. because.. the
> songs an albums are still in different sub-interfaces, so how does this
> help you? It may very well be a good idea, but I just honestly fail to
> see the use so far .. 

Well - the mockup I posted above doesn't actually help this case
(Although my last one did ...) - that'll teach me to try and be
intelligent while I'm ill ...

The problem I have with the current set-up (And it is the only problem!)
is that sometime I want to play "That sneaker pimps album". Of course I
can't remember the album name, so I end up scrolling through my whole
collection looking for it because the dialogue is ordered by album name
and I can't change it to be by artist. Thinking about it, I guess this
really shouldn't be a problem since I can just type "sneaker" into the
search box - but I've never actually used that ... maybe I just need to
adjust myself to using it that way ..?

The mock-up I posted addresses a similar type of problem - but for
different entities. Imagine I want to play "Ice Cream by Sarah
Mclachlan" - currently this is a pain since I have 3 albums by her, and
no idea which one it's on ... If I could list my music library by
artist, or song name [As in my mock up] then I could find it easily. 

It can also help when a user wants to listen to a particular type of
music, ie this morning I'm in the mood for Jazz. You could then just
browse your music groups, find your jazz "group" and play that.

There is an obvious correlation between groups and "genres" here as it's
the only clear use case I can see for "groups". However, I think on
reflection that having *just* genre browsing would be bad as personally
I've never been able to classify my music in such a fashion that it
makes sense (A lot of my music could fit into more than one of my genre
"moods"). Being able to set up groups with real-time criteria would rock
(MP9 calls these "AutoPlaylists"). For example I could set up an group
that contained:

Music of genre Dance
AND Music of genre Trance
AND Music of genre "Alternative Dance"

Which songs comprise that group are generated at playtime so they
automatically take advantage of new music you've brought into your
library that matches the criteria ...

All of this gets a bit complicated to use though ...