Re: [Usability] Category Management (i.e. Rhythmbox Music Player)

[Steve Fosdick <lists pelvoux nildram co uk>]

On 15/06/08 02:46:19, Kirk Bridger wrote:
> It sounds like there's something I'm missing about what tasks the 
> user would be doing where browsing provides the best interface.

For me it is when I want to listen to some music but I don't know what 
I want to listen to.

I may know something about what I want to listen to, for example a 
symphony, a piano concerto, an opera, rock songs, pop etc. but I am 
hoping that browsing is going to give me an idea.

In this case anything that relies on when something was last listened 
to or how often it was listened to is not very helpful.  I am bored 
with whatever I have been listening to and want a change - I want to 
listen to that gem in my music collection that I had forgotten I had.

Looking at the browse lists in rhythbox I have the problem with artist 
categories with only a single artist in as already described - there 
are also more than twice as many artists as albums (3442 to 1329).

Compilation albums are one reason - there are artists in whom I am not 
sufficiently interested to buy a complete album but whose material I 
have by way of a compilation album.  This is only one effect through.

I think the biggest issue is where the same artist appears in the 
listing more than once because rhythbox can not see that it is the same 
artist.  This seems to happen for a number of reasons:

1. Different capitalisation.
2. Article present or absent ("Beatles" v. "The Beatles")
3. Use of "&" v. "and".
4. Presence or absense of commas or other punctuation.
5. Plain misspelling.

If had been very careful and tagged all my music by hand these little 
inconsistencies would not be there but like many people, I suspect, 
many of the tags come from CDDB entries which are created by a variety 
of different people.

When I worked on a web based music browser I addressed some of these 
issues by creating a "sort key" version, both of artist and album which 
was used internally (but never displayed).  This was transformed as 
follows:

1. Remove any leading article unless it was the only word 
present.
2. Remove all characters that are not alphanumeric, i.e. remove any 
spaces and/or punctuation.
3. Map all aphabetic characters to upper case.

Two tracks would be considered to be by the same artist if the two sort 
keys matched, even if the full artist name did not.  The display name 
for this category was the full artist name for the first entry seen.

This still didn't address the '&' issue or misspelling but was much 
more sucessful than the approach taken by rhythmbox.

Another reason for artists with just one entry is collaborations where 
the track is often marked as "A & B" or "A feat. B".  For a small 
collection this may not make much difference but for a large collection 
it may be better for this track to be filed under one of the two 
artists, whichever is regarded as the major one, or even under both of 
them.

On a related issue rhythmbox, in common with some other music players, 
offers a way to browse by genre.  This turns out not be very useful 
either though because of a trend for the genre tag to try to tie down 
the exact musical style which results in too many genres.  To be useful 
for browsing the list of genres needs to be short - probably less than 
ten.  Having just two genres ('Classical' and 'Popular') would be more 
useful than having 127 (as in my current collection).

Regards,
Steve.