Re: [Muine] album/song suggestion

[Jorn Baayen <jbaayen gnome org>]

Hi,

On R, 2005-02-18 at 14:31 -0800, justin+gnome dicatek com wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> (This should probably be a reply to "A few suggestions" but I just
> subscribed to the list so I don't have it in my mail. Sorry...)

Welcome ;)

> It seems like one problem is the separation between albums and songs. A
> separate problem that I have is that I listen mainly to classical music,
> where the most important piece of information is the composer/artist which
> is not shown in the playlist. Also often one album will have many many
> tracks, which makes the playlist very long.

This depends on how you tag your files..

I listen to a lot of classical music as well, and tend to put the
composer into "artist" and performers into "performer". 

> My suggestion is for lists of music: have a list item with artist and
> title and a picture of the CD, and below that, list each track on a
> *single* line. So you're listing individual songs, but grouping by album.
> 
> Something like this:
> 
> -------------------------------------------
> ******* J.S. Bach
> **pic** Goldberg Variations
> *******
> *******
> -------------------------------------------
> Aria
> Variation 1
> Variation 2
> Variation 3. Canon On The Unison
> Variation 4
> etc.
> Variation 30. Quodlibet
> Aria Da Capa
> -------------------------------------------
> ******* Beethoven
> **pic** Symphony No. 9
> *******
> *******
> -------------------------------------------
> Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestroso
> Molto vivace
> Adagio molto e cantabile
> Presto
> Presto
> -------------------------------------------
> 
> Perhaps the length of the track could be listed on the right. If there's
> only a single song from an album, you could just put the song name in the
> list item for the album.
> 
> Either the entire album could be selected, or individual tracks can be
> selected.
> 
> If there is a good way to show and hide the individual tracks (perhaps
> only show tracks when the album is selected? Or on a search which matches
> tracks...) then the "Play Song" and "Play Album" windows could be merged
> to "Select Music" or something. Also this would help with my problem of
> having a really long playlist.

I think this would probably end up being rather chaotic .. 

Also, it is technically not very feasible.. as the rows will have
variable height, which will disallow us to use treeview's "fixed height
mode".. making it very slow for bigger collections.

> Another unrelated suggestion: one of those rotating arrow widgets to
> show/hide the playlist in the main window would be convenient, so that I
> could leave Muine up but not take up too much screen space.

This has come up a lot .. so far I've decided not to add it. A patch
is here though:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162316

Right now it is very easy to see the structure of the window by scanning
your eye along the left edge of the window. The main actual reason why
I'm not commiting th expander is because the arrow in front of the
"Playlist" label shifts the label a few pixels to the right. By that the
"eye scanning" breaks.

Otherwise, I see it is a fairly useful feature to have. Having a small
expander arrow on the right might work though, never thought of that
before. I'll look into it.

Cheers,

Jorn