I have been through the couple of threads about improving music section / creating a new music plugin but there is very little in there that is a firm idea of what could actually be changed / implemented.
I see a couple of recurring themes
(1) Playlists are bad
(2) I want music section to be like TV series / Moving Pictures
(3) Music is not intuitive
but there is very little substance to this....
I am looking for more details on what you want to see improved. eg. for playlists what actually is it that you don't like? Is it creating, manipulating, loading, lack of smart playists ??
The TV series one confuses me too, is it the fact that TV series has eye-candy? TV series does what it does well but remember that it is dealing with a limited set of data and all the data is retrieved from a good source but dependant on you naming your files correctly. Music is far more complicated; many more ways to sort the data and many more more sources. Eg. I saw one good idea about having artist / album info on some screen (possibly whilst browsing the collection, possibly in now-playing) the problem with this is sourcing the data. TV series can easily pickup a synopsis of the series / season / episode but for music you have masses and masses of data
Take Aerosmith for example, the two main sources of music info (allmusic.com and last.fm) have more than enough data to full several pages let alone fit into a small area on an existing screen and still be useful
Aerosmith | AllMusic
Aerosmith?s Biography ? Free listening, videos, concerts, stats, & pictures at Last.fm
and this is just the bio so you will need to add albums, genres... to this.
The data is available in MP just on a different screen.
I am not going to discuss tagging as I think this is a given for all music programs and I can't see this changing for MP1. Basically if you want a good music experience then tag your music (no different to TV series where you have to set your metadata first by naming the files correctly)
I am also not really looking for feedback on how it looks. A lot of skins use the Fanart Handler plugin to create some great looking pages and MP still needs to cater for users with low spec machines so the core MP look is not going to change.
I am not saying anything is going to change but if ideas come back which we are able to implement we will consider them. If not the ideas will be taken into account for MP2.
I see a couple of recurring themes
(1) Playlists are bad
(2) I want music section to be like TV series / Moving Pictures
(3) Music is not intuitive
but there is very little substance to this....
I am looking for more details on what you want to see improved. eg. for playlists what actually is it that you don't like? Is it creating, manipulating, loading, lack of smart playists ??
The TV series one confuses me too, is it the fact that TV series has eye-candy? TV series does what it does well but remember that it is dealing with a limited set of data and all the data is retrieved from a good source but dependant on you naming your files correctly. Music is far more complicated; many more ways to sort the data and many more more sources. Eg. I saw one good idea about having artist / album info on some screen (possibly whilst browsing the collection, possibly in now-playing) the problem with this is sourcing the data. TV series can easily pickup a synopsis of the series / season / episode but for music you have masses and masses of data
Take Aerosmith for example, the two main sources of music info (allmusic.com and last.fm) have more than enough data to full several pages let alone fit into a small area on an existing screen and still be useful
Aerosmith | AllMusic
Aerosmith?s Biography ? Free listening, videos, concerts, stats, & pictures at Last.fm
and this is just the bio so you will need to add albums, genres... to this.
The data is available in MP just on a different screen.
I am not going to discuss tagging as I think this is a given for all music programs and I can't see this changing for MP1. Basically if you want a good music experience then tag your music (no different to TV series where you have to set your metadata first by naming the files correctly)
I am also not really looking for feedback on how it looks. A lot of skins use the Fanart Handler plugin to create some great looking pages and MP still needs to cater for users with low spec machines so the core MP look is not going to change.
I am not saying anything is going to change but if ideas come back which we are able to implement we will consider them. If not the ideas will be taken into account for MP2.