Re: [Muine] Song information dialog

[Jorn Baayen <jbaayen dds nl>]

Hi,

On Thu, 2004-02-26 at 13:39 -0800, Link Dupont wrote:

> Obviously all this is IMHO only, so I'm not going to interject that
> elsewhere in my comments.
> 
> On Thu, 2004-02-26 at 09:55, Jorn Baayen wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I've been paving the way for getting a song/album information window
> > in.. but I can't figure out a design. Ideas/help would be most welcome.
> > 
> > Some things:
> > 1. It will be read-only, we won't do tagging. Tagging is something that
> > belongs in a tagging app, which will be much better at doing the job.
> > (I've been planning to write a decent tagger supporting multiple artists
> > for a while..)
> 
> Yes! A decent tagging app is much needed in my opinion. Something that
> has a nice UI and can do advanced batch tagging (like easytag, only with
> an infinitely better UI). I've hacked up a little tagger I call
> musictag[0] (goes along with my now-in-deep-hibernation music playing
> program musicbox).

Yeap.

That thingie looks pretty neat- what formats does it support.. and what
libs did you use..? 

> 
> > 2. We want it to display the following information, at least:
> > - Song title
> > - Song artists
> > - Song performers, if any
> > - Year of release
> 
> Genre? Or is genre going out of style/usage.

I have no strong opinion here.. 

I think that when you are listening to a song there is no need to know
what genre it is, as you know what kind of music you are listening to
already anyway..

Also, I find genre information rather useless myself.. I have a lot of
music that could be categorised as either progressive rock,
instrumental, or jazz, or whatever more.. so whats the use then .. 
Of course, it works pretty well if you have a collection composed of
both Mozart and trance, but I tend to think that's pretty rare ..

But if the tag carries any real value to people I don't mind adding it.

> 
> > Then, what do we do with the associated album information?
> > - Cover image
> > - Album tracks
> 
> Yes I'd say both for albums. Maybe lay it out in a way similar to
> Amazon's, with the album image, info, then track listing down below.

Yea.. 

A thing we need to decide on:
Say, the user selects a song, calls the info window. We show song info,
alright, but what do we do with the album info? do we put like a
separator under the straight song info and then put the album info? or a
link to the album info? or a button?

> 
> > We could also have:
> > - Link to the allmusic site, a link to a google query on the artist,
> > whatever. 
> > 
> > Also, how will the user be able to call up the dialog?
> > - From the tray?
> > - From a menu in the playlist UI- but on the selected song or on the
> > playing song? Selected song would be better probably, but all other
> > items in the song menu work on the playing song ..
> > - From the Add song/Add album windows? 
> 
> What about a small button somewhere with the light-bulb icon in it. Info
> from the tray is fine as is, currently playing song title & artist.
> It seems that both the light-bulb button &/| a "Song information" entry
> in the Song menu would both be centered on the currently playing song,
> and I think that's fine.
> In the Add Song dialog, I'd consider adding in another light-bulb
> button, but this button pulls up the dialog on the selected song.
> Dare I suggest adding a right-click context menu to the playlist?
> Frankly, I love the fact that Muine _doesn't_ have that, but it seems
> like a logical place to put song info.
> [ On second thought, I'd have the light-bulb button pull up the selected
> song. The currently playing song info is displayed in the main UI
> already. If the user wanted more information about it, would it make
> sense to select it, then hit the info button? I'm leaving my other
> comments above too, just in case it sparks anything. ]

I think selected song makes me more sense indeed.. also, most of the
time the playing song is selected anyway, so most of the time it would
be that anyway. But yea, a button is a good idea..  but I think we
should put it in the toolbar once we use one. (The idea is to use one
once Gtk# supports the Gtk 2.3 APIs..)

> 
> > I'd like to display it in an attractive form, basically like a webpage
> > or something.. not like the xmms file info dialog for example. That
> > would be a pain for multiple artists, it would imply editing, and most
> > of all it is not an attractive way to read information about what you
> > are listening to.
> 
> I like the "webpage" concept rather than the GtkLabel/GtkEntry layout.
> Maybe something like the GNOME About dialogs? Use some pretty pango font
> markups and layout on a simple canvas. What about something kind of like
> the actual GNOME About (right-click on gnome-panel, select "About
> GNOME"). That might break UI conformity though.

Yea, I started implementing something like that.. until I found out that
you can't select text in a canvas :( Well, there is one canvas item that
does support selection but it doesn't support markup. Blah ;)

I also tried GtkHTML.. but it doesn't support CSS so doing a decent
layout without evil hacks is a pain.. also, I had to do really ugly
hacks to pass the cover image. Write it out to a tmp file and load it in
again, etc.

So what I did for now (Just a proof-of-concept dialog..) is just a
GtkTable with widgets, in a scrolledwindow, but all given a white
background. Looks neat, but you cant select the whole page for example..
feels a bit crappy :/

If anyone's got good suggestions for doing the layout technically
speaking they'd be very welcome ..


Thanks!

Jorn