Re: [Muine] [PATCH] incomplete albums

[Matthew Good <muine matt-good net>]

On Sat, 2005-01-15 at 18:03 +0100, Jorn Baayen wrote:
> Here's a patch doing the total tracks thing then. I haven't commited it
> yet, as we first need the fixing script.
> 
> Jorn

If something like this is added to Muine, I really don't think it should
be the default behavior.  I can see that there might be some situations
in which it would be useful to filter out incomplete albums, however
what if I want to play all music by a particular artist, including the
random tracks where I don't have the full album?

Jorn, I know you don't like it, but I'd personally be in favor of
displaying the track count and play time by each album.  I think that it
could be made fairly unobtrusive, but it would give people the ability
to determine at a glance how much music they're getting out of an album.
Having a new Properties window for an album could be useful for more
detailed information, like a listing of the available tracks and
whatever is in the less used tags like the year, etc, but if all I want
to do is play a good selection Soul Coughing and I can't remember which
albums are complete, or nearly complete, I don't want to open the
Properties for every album to figure out which one I'd like to play.  

Personally, most of my music collection is complete albums, so I
generally rely on the Play Album dialog for selecting my music.  For me
it's useful to have the incomplete albums listed in there, or otherwise
I would probably forget about them (out of sight, out of mind).  I think
the tracks/time thing would give people the information they need
without hiding any music away.  

If Muine does get something for actually filtering albums from the list,
maybe it should be something like in the Gnome "Search for Files" dialog
with the "> Show More options" that would drop down a section where the
user could enter more detailed search criteria: at least X tracks, at
least X minutes, complete albums, year, etc.  If people want to be able
to filter the album list, maybe we should give them the options, but I
don't think it should be something hidden away where they don't realize
that it's happening.

-- 
Matthew Good <muine matt-good net>