Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Feedback on album cover support

[chombee <chombee nerdshack com>]

On Mon, 2007-02-12 at 16:03 +0100, Christophe Dehais wrote:
> On 2/12/07, chombee <chombee nerdshack com> wrote:
> > * 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.
> 
> agreed. It would be great to have a more graphical mode for the
> browser, like iTunes has:
> 
> http://images.apple.com/itunes/jukebox/images/index_hero_mac20060912.jpg

Yeah, that iTunes screenshot is much like what I was imagining for the
playlist pane. I scribbled down a mockup on paper but don't have a
scanner or camera for it. But it seems that tracks are grouped by album
in the playlist, so they could be visually separated in some way like
iTunes has a horizontal rule between albums, (I actually prefer Muine's
method for this) then just have one album cover in the browser
associated with all the tracks of the album. Like in that screenshot,
yes.

I also imagined the album cover (much smaller) of the playing song
appearing across the top next to Previous/Play/Next etc., and small
album covers appearing next to each album in the album pane of the
browser.

I think Banshee's approach of putting Previous, Play, Next etc. and the
progress bar and current song info all alongside each other at the top
is better than rhythmbox having the progress bar below the buttons. Rb
seems to waste some space here.

All in all I think the use of simple text fields in rhythmbox in the
playlist and artist and album panes makes it look a bit like a
spreadsheet. The type of combined multi-line text and image widget (or
whatever) that muine uses is much cooler.