[Rhythmbox-devel] Song browsing

["William Jon McCann" <mccann jhu edu>]

Hi,

If we assume that the album as a unit of distribution and
categorization is on the decline then what does a next generation
"browser" mode look like?

This is one of the reasons why our primary interface is search based.

Most browsing based interfaces still use an album browser despite the
fact that songs are increasingly acquired individually, from
collections, or from multiple albums.  In many cases where songs are
released directly to the net they never even appear on an album.  Also
even when you buy an album of songs online you don't necessarily have
a strong association between the album art and the songs so browsing
by album art isn't always very natural.

How can we do better?

A tag cloud browser?  An artist browser with artist info, summary, and
most played/favorite songs a la last.fm?  Any wild ideas?

Jon