Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Album Art

[Charles Schmidt <cschmidt2 emich edu>]

On Sun, 2004-09-19 at 17:54 +0200, Fredrik Noring wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Here are two screen dumps of what Rhythmbox might look like with album
> art pictures:
> 
>    http://noring.nocrew.org/rhythmbox/
> 
> First image is pretty straight-forward. Front cover (and back cover
> etc., if available) of currently playing song is displayed at the top.
> Front covers, if available, are also displayed in the album list.

The first problem, imho, is that the images up there next to the
prev/play/next and song title widgets 

	a) look out of place
	b) clutter up the area
	c) are too small

I think it makes more sense to put them somewhere else.  iTunes (afaik)
puts it below the source browser.  I don't think this is the best place
either, since it seems too out of the way and not in direct connection
to the playing song.  I'm not sure of the best middle ground, but I
really don't like them up there next to the song title.  

I don't especially like this version of the album list.  With any more
than 10 albums the album list will be much too long, and there is a lot
of wasted whitespace.

> Second image shows the album list in a "compact mode".

This one is actually quite neat, I hadn't thought of putting the album
picture there.  I would definitly retag my mp3s with the album image if
RB had this.  Either way though, it should definitly be a configuration
option as to what is show in the album list.  Maybe it could be placed
above the source list?  If I had gimp installed (its compiling right
now) I'd mess with your mockups to see what it looks like, perhaps some
one could get to it first?

Maybe we shouldn't bother with showing the playing song's album image?
I really like this album browser, perhaps thats enough use of the image?
Or if RB ever gets visualizations it could be used as a backing image to
that.  

Honestly, this compact mode idea has really got me going, I'd definitly
hack it up if people were interested and/or offered to help.

> Rhythmbox could easily fetch these pictures from the ID3-tag. Maybe its
> database would need to be extended with references to the songs that
> contain pictures and of what type?

It should/could also do it the muine way with a cover.[jpg/png/gif] in
the same directory as the mp3 (perhaps this is a "standard" or
something?)  It could also (stealing a page from muine's book) fetch the
image from amazon or allmusic or something (and cache it for later use,
of course).

> Fredrik

-- 
-charlie