[Rhythmbox-devel] Feedback on album cover support

[chombee <chombee nerdshack com>]

Any planned developments for rhythmbox's album cover support?

I know from the archive that local image file support was recently added
and drag-and-drop is planned. This would be very good. I think there's
more to be done though...

* Having the album cover in the bottom-left corner doesn't seem right.
The image is not very obviously associated with the album. People might
not know what it is. I like the way Banshee puts a small album image
right next to the text giving the album/artist/song name [1]. This
associates it well wit the album, and if you mouse-over the tiny image
you see a full size preview. Ignore the second album cover image they
have in the bottom left, that works just like rhythmbox and is pointless
when they're already displaying it at the top.

[1]: http://banshee-project.org/Image:0_11_0_cd-rip.png

Muine does something similar, placing the album image near the album
name on the interface [2].

[2]: http://muine-player.org/wiki/Image:CMMainPageScreenshot.png

As does Quod Libet [3]

[3]:
http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/7519/capturequodlibetdescendxc8.png

I think Rhythmbox has enough empty space along the top to do something
like this.

Also having the image in the bottom left is not very good use of space.
The side-pane is already crowded with the source list and play queue and
the users playlists. The user may want to add many playlists, and the
album art gets in the way of this. On my machine, at 1024*768, there is
no space for source list, queued songs and album art, and I don't even
have any playlists. And the source list can't be hidden, so something
else has to go.

* Album images are really useful for browsing and finding albums. You
can recognise the image more quickly than the text, or at least it helps
to have both. And showing many album images looks pretty. Both Quod
Libet [3] and Muine [2] above do this. In Muine I find myself looking
for the image rather than the album name. It is very nice. It'd be good
to have little album covers in the browser pane. Banshee had some
mockups for doing just this I think.

Both of these improvements would make using Rhythmbox as a music kiosk,
to show off a collection of music, as in my previous post much nicer.

What do you think?