Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Album Art

[Charles Schmidt <cschmidt2 emich edu>]

On Sun, 2004-09-19 at 19:45 +0200, Fredrik Noring wrote:
> Hi Charles
> 
> > 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
> 
> The images were placed there "by association", because album name and
> album images goes together, no? I agree that they are too small though.
> But I didn't want to suggest too many changes at once, completely
> reworking the interface. :) Clicking on the images could show them
> bigger.

I get the association, its just that they look so out of place.  Perhaps
the song title should be to the left of them or something.  I'm not
sure.  And surely clicking on them would give you a larger view.

> > 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?
> 
> I've added a third image, showing the compact album browser only.

Yeah, that looks awesome, to me.

> > Or if RB ever gets visualizations it could be used as a backing image to
> > that.  
> 
> What's "visualizations"?

Like a spectrum analyzer, or flashy colors that follow the music or what
have you.  Visualizing the music.

> > 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.
> 
> I'm interested. :)

I'm currently a bit preoccupied with my work on iTunes shares, but in a
week or two I should be mostly done and can devote a bit more time to
this.

> > 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).
> 
> I've made a patch to support ID3-tag pictures in EasyTAG GTK2.4-pre2. 
> Perhaps you will find it useful:
> 
> http://noring.nocrew.org/easytag/easytag-0.31_gtk2.4_pre2-cover-art1.patch
> 
> A neat thing about ID3 pictures is that several types are supported. So
> clicking on "Properties" on a song could bring up a window showing front
> and back cover pictures, leaflet pictures, artist pictures, pictures
> during recording/performance along with comments etc.

I wasn't even aware you could store them in the id3 tag.  Seems like a
waste of space to store the image in every mp3 for an album, you know?
Lets say you've got 22 songs on the disc, thats 21 copies of the image
too many, imho.  The cover.jpg way seems a lot more economical (and
easier, since you don't need a tag editor).

> Fredrik

-- 
-charlie