My Music - need your thoughts on how to improve and enhance (3 Viewers)

[idioteque]

I have sugested MP to a lot of my friends and there wifes/girlfriends.

For some of the wifes, MP just has too much function, not for me

for example:


just play mp3
playlist play
scrobble
shuffle

change view (date, file etc)
icons ( big view, icons )
sort ( ID3 tags sort)

I think the music part is great and I need a lot of features, but I can see that some just want to play a single album or song.

So the question becomes, how to tailor to both needs, perhaps a simple music and an extended music would be an idea.

simple music just plays the selected mp3, and continues to the nex in the folder, no changes in views are posible, no playlists just play an play next with a very reduced gui

advanced music is the music already in MP today

 

[knutinh]

I see what you mean. I think that My music shoud probably default to "Folder view" the first time. This way, people wont get annoyed by any buttons or functions, as they will recognize the folders just like they are used to in explorer.

Hopefully theyll get the idea along that searching and organising into playlists is a good way to get the music that you want.

-k

 

[simulant]

"default to folder view"

I second that.

Also..

* Have a button on the remote mapped to "goto parent directory"
* right click or info with "play entire folder" option. (recursive)
* Winamp Visualization support

 

[rtv]

"default to folder view"
I second that.

folder view is the slowest of all once your database is set up correctly since all thumbs are fetched maybe from network shares..

* Have a button on the remote mapped to "goto parent directory"

The back button works like "u" as long as the list has focus

* right click or info with "play entire folder" option. (recursive)

"add to playlist" works exactly like this - even better: just press play

 

[knutinh]

folder view is the slowest of all once your database is set up correctly since all thumbs are fetched maybe from network shares..

I am not argueing that. But I had a good friend trying MP indepedent of me and giving it up "because it was impossible to view folders properly". Of course, he should have tried a little harder or asked me.

Same with my GF: She will instantly switch to folder-mode because that is where she is more comfortable.

The fact that "folder-view" has a name that most useres dont recognize probably makes it worse. I am not argueing that I am right and you are wrong, just relaying feedback from two users that wasnt as positive as me wrgt MP in the first place.

I guess the philosophical question is: Should users be forced/coerced into doing what we know will be best for them in the long run, or should the UI behave according to their initial demnds?

with regards (and keep up the good work)

Knut

 

[rtv]

M$ forces all office user into a new GUI experience, too

Scratch that

I'll try to speed up shares view, too since this is what I use often

 

[dcwp]

First, thanks to everyone who works on MediaPortal. This is an awesome interface and it has really changed my HTPC experience. I wish I could contribute, but I haven't written a line of code since I took BASIC and Turing in highschool (early '90s).

There are just a couple of features that I think could improve MP, and some may already be available, just not obvious to me.

1) Is there a way to shuffle all songs? I'd like (and my wife keeps asking me how) to just hit play and let MP shuffle through all the songs on my hd. I know that I can shuffle through an artist or album, but even shuffling an artist seems to go one album at a time and sometimes I want more random.

2) I think it's been said, but a shuffle toggle switch somewhere on the player or the "Now Playing" page would be very useful.

3) This may have already been mentioned, but a smart shuffle (shuffle entire drive, but limit to genre, artist, rating, etc) could be useful.

4) Another variant of smart shuffle suggested by the wife (again may already exist): My wife likes to work her way through our music by starting on a song she likes, then when the "Now Playing" screen offers "Other tracks tagged with:..." she automatically clicks the first song on the list (the second or third if she's already heard the first one or doesn't like it). Just doing that, you can spend hours working your way slowly through all the genres in your collection without the quick shifts involved in a truly random shuffle.
So the suggestion would be to make a shuffle option that does this automatically. If it got to a dead end it could go back to the previous song and choose the second item on its list or something.
We have messed with the scrobbler a bit, but it seems to stay within a genre and requires you to start with a playlist. Here we're just thinking of hitting play on one song and getting the whole hard drive experience.

That's it for now. None of this is meant as any sort of criticism, I am really in awe of the MediaPortal project. Keep up the good work!

 

[Jetboy]

dcwp:
1) To shuffle all songs you'll have to make a playlist. Just add one song to an empty playlist and it will start playing. Then go to playlist view, activate scrobbling and set scrobble mode to Random. It will build a random playlist for you. If there is a quicker way to shuffle play, I don't know about it.

4) It sounds like you could use the scrobbler for this. In configuration.exe there's a setting for the scrobbler to base the playlist on the first song only, or on all the tracks in the playlist.

 

[hwahrmann]

This thread is no longer manageable. too big.
i'm closing it now.
Please open new threads in the "listen music" forums